Internet Marketing Produces Small Business Success Stories Part 2 of 5

You hear about small business success stories every day.  You may be wondering what their secret is.  The fact of the matter is that businesses who act as internet marketing leaders in their industry are doing well, even in this tough economy.

How can internet marketing help your business?  This week we are examining the success of several small businesses and looking at how they used internet marketing to gain an advantage over their competitors.  Use these stories as your own inspiration and hopefully you will investigate effective internet marketing techniques to help launch your own business forward.

Yesterday, in Case Study #1 we looked at The Gardener whose goal was to improve their sale of franchises and so in addition to their pay per click (PPC) campaign they decided to work on:

• Improving their website
• Building better conversion architecture
• Adding search engine optimization (SEO) to their strategy

Today, we’ll examine two small businesses in Case Study #2 – Carpet Deals and Oakville Home Leisure.

Case Study #2: Carpet Deals and Oakville Home Leisure

Carpet Deals was stuck in the traditional advertising trap.  It cost approximately $55 in newspaper ads in order to get just one in home carpet appointment, which is not a good return on investments. Using their original, old website they started doing a PPC campaign and found that it cost $15 in Google ad costs in order to get one in home carpet appointment.  This is a significant difference in price to get the same result!

However, although the return on investment was unquestionably better with their PPC campaign than with traditional newspaper advertising, WSI Milton pointed out that having a PPC ad funnel to a poorly designed landing page is an ineffective use of a PPC budget.

Based on this advice Carpet Deals decided to redo their website in order to make better use of conversion architecture.  Tune in later this week to learn about how their efforts paid off.

Oakville Home Leisure is in the home leisure business, which includes dealing with products such as patio furniture, hot tubs, spas, pool tables and accessories.  As a family owned business operating since 1988 they were used to traditions, and there was no exception when it came to internet marketing.

It took a while, but when their son started to bug them to get into internet marketing they finally listened. They started out by creating a well designed, functional website that contained an up-to-date product catalogue that Oakville Home Leisure can easily make changes to and update.  Once their website was in place they decided to add:

• Pay per click
• Search engine optimization
• Email marketing

Stay tuned! Later this week we’ll talk about how the change from traditional advertising to internet marketing produced positive results for Oakville Home Leisure and improved their return on investment.

To experience good return on investments when it comes to advertising dollars you want to ensure you are using effective internet marketing techniques.  Do you have your own small business success stories to share?

Are you pleased with how internet marketing is working for you? Share your success, frustrations and questions with WSI Milton, leaders in internet marketing and website design.

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