Forget about shopping carts & trying to make sales directly from your site. Your strength lies in the fact that you have a better selection of jewelry & the customer can actually touch & feel the pieces. The online retailers can’t offer this kind of presentation using photos alone.

Don’t try to compete with online retailers in their own arena.

Take the home court advantage!

Every page on your site should be designed to funnel the viewer into your store. To do this you need to consider all of the reasons why a person is on your site in order to tailor the content to their needs.

The obvious reason would be that they are looking to get married or they have an anniversary or birthday or some other gift giving occasion which jewelry would be appropriate for.

Next you need to consider how they are finding your website.

These are some of the ways a visitor finds your website

• FREE search results
• Paid search results
• Print or other advertisement

Print & Other Ad Visitors

The chances of someone typing your website in after seeing or hearing an advertisement is pretty slim unless there’s some kind of hook in the ad. Offer a special in the ad or promote a social/charitable event.

Have a microsite tailored to each particular offering.

Use a separate dot com name to point to a promotional microsite.

A microsite can be a simple one page announcement or a full blown website in itself. You can use the same hosting account that you use for your main website. The only cost is for the additional dot com name & the page design. If the microsite promotes a charity you may be able to get someone to design it for FREE!

FREE Search Result Visitors

These guys more than likely found your website because you’ve done a great job of optimizing your site for local search.

They may or may not have been looking at online retailers before they found you.

You should probably include highly visible links to any microsites or other special offer pages which you are already advertising to the general public.

Paid Search Result Visitors

These guys need to be sent from your ad to a special landing page.

The page content needs to be specific to the keywords they used to find your ad.

If they typed “diamonds” then you want them landing on a page that states you will match online diamond prices & then outline the additional advantages of coming to see you.

• Bigger selection of rings
• See before you buy
• Hometown service for life
• FREE watch battery?

The landing page should include navigational links to the rest of your website.

However; your main website should not have any links directly to this page. The reason for this is obvious. You do not want to tell them that it’s possible to compare diamond prices online.

By the same token don’t specifically mention Blue Nile or any other online retailer when you offer to price match. Simply say you’ll match online retailers diamond prices & leave it up to the visitor to find the online dealers (they’ve probably already found them if they’re on your landing page but there’s no sense advertising for them anyway.)

People tend to focus on selling directly from their website.

There are more productive methods.

I hope this has been helpful!

Feel free to comment…

Microsites are web destinations that are separate from a company’s primary site. They have their own distinct domain name and consist of content focused on a particular product or service.

You can host a microsite using your existing hosting account. Your hosting account provides you with a lot more storage space than you are actually using. In fact a lot of people use their online hosting account to backup files from their computer.

Microsites use a narrower focus & can be used as hubs for a specific marketing campaign. They’re more easily optimized for search engines & if their content is good enough, can drive word-of-mouth or viral marketing traffic to your main website.

Philips USA makes consumer electronics ranging from TVs and medical equipment to coffee makers and electric toothbrushes. Their main site reflects that diversity, with links to relevant content and to an e-commerce store. It works as a central destination for the company as a whole but using the site to market specific product lines proved to be complicated and inefficient.

When Philips chose to use the Web to market a special electric razor designed for grooming men’s “personal areas” they mounted a microsite dedicated only to that product.

Using the URL www.ShaveEverywhere.com the site shows video of a guy using amusingly appropriate fruits and vegetables to show how the razor can help the consumer. A link also shows users where they can purchase the razor.

Another microsite www.WhenItFeelsRight.com promotes a Greek white wine called Boutari Moschofilero. The site picked up on the Greek theme by promoting women as goddesses and offering premiums such as a night out with 10 friends & an interactive “Boutari Dating Guide” built entirely around an encounter with Mr. Wrong!

One big virtue of microsites is that they can be adjusted quickly and on the fly to suit your needs without affecting the carefully constructed content on your main website.

Microsites are much easier to optimize for a specific keyword or phrase.

Focusing on the keywords & phrases in the URL, title tags, headlines, body text and file names.

You can benefit from microsites as long as your content is good. The site doesn’t necessarily have to be funny but it should be entertaining & have focused content with clear marketing objectives.

A good microsite can be your most passionate sales rep, working 24 hours a day!

Get in touch with me for a brainstorming session to develop a microsite for your business.

Instead you’ll see Blue Nile, MySolitaire.com & BarskyDiamonds.com along with a host of others. I’ve done this in every town I ever visited & the results are almost identical. These sites are extremely well optimized so they consistently show up in organic (FREE) & paid search results. The only way a local jeweler will show up is by using paid search results.

It’s a fact that the vast majority of online shoppers who are considering a large purchase will want to actually see live goods. Seeing your name in paid search results will increase your chances of getting them in your store.

Of course the online shopper will probably type in “your city + jewelers” to decide who to visit. If you’re highly ranked for this search term it will reinforce the paid results they’ve been seeing when they use the more broad search terms.

Blue Nile is a publicly traded company & their annual report is chock full of information about how they do what they do & who they do it with.

They state that the average consumer on their site takes 90 days to make a purchase & that gives you plenty of time to get them in the store & close the deal! They’ll be eager to show you how much they know about diamonds & will more than likely load both your barrels with plenty of ammo to close the sale.

Blue Nile makes an average of 20% on their diamonds & key to triple on their mountings.

Your competitive advantages

• Customer sees the product
• More mounting choices
• Possible designer lines
• Service after the sale

Pay Per Click Ad Cost

When your PPC ad shows up in a search it’s called an “impression” & you are not charged anything. You’re only charged when someone clicks on your ad. You can get 1000’s of impressions for 5 or 10 clicks.

You decide the maximum you’ll pay for clicks on each keyword & you can set your budget for a maximum daily & monthly spend. You will not be charged for more than your budget or the balance of your AdWords account.

If another advertiser is bidding higher than you for a particular keyword & their budget for the day, week or month gets shot then your ads will move up in the rankings.

You can learn about the effectiveness of your ads by tracking impressions, placement position & clicks in your AdWords reports. If an ad is getting a ton of impressions & no clicks you may need to change the ad so that it’s more compelling. This is something you can’t do in mid-stream with a billboard or print ad!

Ads & Landing Pages

When a shopper clicks one of your ads they should be directed to a landing page specifically tailored to that ad. Visitors to your landing page should be presented with the same theme & navigational links (menus) as those on your main site so they can visit all the other pages in a seamless presentation. However if your landing page offers to match online diamond prices the landing page should not be accessible from any of your main site’s pages. Simply don’t include any links to the landing page in your website’s main menus. This will ensure that visitors who haven’t seen your ad aren’t encouraged to price shop online.

If your ad is targeted to shoppers searching for diamonds then they should be directed to a landing page which states you are competitive with the online retailers & you offer the additional advantage of a greater selection of mountings (designer lines if you carry them) & service after the sale in addition to any other benefits you provide over the online retailers. The price of the diamond is probably going to be the clincher. If it comes down to it sell them a mounting they can’t find online (Blue Nile only carries plain vanilla mountings) & send them on their way!

Call 850.206.2251 for assistance in organizing an online ad campaign.

Feel free to comment on this & any article you see here…