Making Internet Marketing work is a full-time job. Employing all necessary strategies to gain trust online and get and keep the attention of possible language students is something that requires ongoing, well-orchestrated activities.
It also requires substantial funds if you want to be ahead of your competition in search engine results using SEO optimization and high-quality content for your blog that makes people wanting to share your information with others on social media.
How do you know if this is all worth it? To be more specific: how do you know which activities are the most valuable ones and bring in the most sales?
The key to stopping the guesswork is tracking.
The tricky part is often when you ask students how they did find out about your language services, that they often do not exactly remember.
So it is your job to track and control as much as possible with your Internet activities.
Tracking of what people do online: you can do analysis and research on what is trending in language learning products and if there might be something you should develop and offer to meet those needs.
Tracking for your website: implementing analytics tools like those from Google can help you understand what potential language customers did search for, how they found your website in the first place.
Tracking also what content is most popular on your blog – and tracking your social media: what makes people follow and like your Facebook, Twitter or other social media accounts. There are specific analysis tools for almost any social media platform out there.
It is barely impossible to be equally present on each social media platform, so tracking which one is the best performing is essential so you can focus your energy and resources where you get the most attention.
Tracking the ranking of your website: monitoring the position of your web pages helps you understand how to gain more natural (unpaid) traffic. People usually are way too lazy to look on page 2 and beyond when entering keywords on search engines.
The goal is to be present on page 1 in prominent positions (it is not always necessary to be Number One, though – see our article Why Being #1 Is Not Always A Good Thing ).
SEO requires time where paid traffic strategies like Bing Ads or Google Adwords produce traffic and visitors to your website instantly. In both cases spending money is involved.
SEO expert analysis will show what needs to be changed with your website (things like adding and categorizing relevant images and linking to social media, as well as technical aspects such as web server speed, where your website is hosted).
Usually, you should see improved results after a few weeks, but depending on the problems your website has in search engines based on the wrong strategy you did apply, it might take several months.
SEO is an ongoing process though: even if you fix problems you need to constantly evolve your website, and keep it fresh and up-to-date to meet the quality standards of Google and Co.
Tracking paid advertising campaigns is usually easier than tracking the cost for SEO, as for paid campaigns you know that you spend €100 for an ad that ran in the first week of October, and you know that 250 people clicked on it, that 20 people signed up for your newsletter and 2 people signed up for a language class.
So now you know that it costs you €50 to make 2 sales
and it cost you €12.50 to get a newsletter subscriber from that campaign.
The important part is that if you have a newsletter, you need to understand where those signups come from: are those from paid campaigns or do they come from your ongoing social media or blogging activities?
Only when you track and know where they come from you can do more of the same to attract more of them.
That is also why only PAID advertising is what you can multiply by money. If you pay €100 to get 2 sales, then you should get 4 sales if you pay €200, all things being equal (paying more doubles the number of clicks and visitors in a calculated, predictable manner).
With NATURAL traffic when Google or Bing ranks you better and you gain more visitors and traffic you do not control how much additional traffic you will get. You can not predict it like with paid traffic. But you can do track how much more traffic you get and see if that natural traffic gives you more sales over a specific paid advertising campaign.
So for example, if you have posted an important article on how to learn numbers faster in a specific language and with improving your SEO results you gain now 100 subscribers and have 5 sales for a language course this might outperform a single paid advertising campaign on Twitter where you only got 20 subscribers and 1 sale by spending €200.
If you want to calculate the cost of producing a lead and when you break even with making a sale for your language services, you can use our lead-calculating page here.
In order to know what is working online for you, you need to see everything you do online as a marketing experiment.
A lot of companies do not track their online activities sufficiently. We do track things for your language school and language services when you start working with us and help you to understand better how you can control and understand your marketing activities better.
Learn more at our language marketing service page
