Lead Generation Marketing is when you identify your potential marketing and target your advertisements towards your demographic who is actively seeking your product or services. If you sell shoes, and someone searches “shoes” in Google, you would bid on this keyword and offer your services. It has the most advertiser competition since it’s the most effective, and also often yields the highest conversion rate. If you are in an established industry or even a niche, lead generation works great because customers are seeking your services, all you have to do is guide them in a frictionless experience towards your conversion goal. Paid search marketing is the most common approach, yet its also the easiest to have a negative return on investment because of saturated advertising networks such as Google Adwords, especially in popular industries such as electronics. Exploiting long tale tactics such as bidding on thousands of less popular keywords, synonyms, and typos, is the best approach to reach a positive return on marketing investment.

Demand Generation is much different and consists of identifying your potential market, and targeting potential customers even though they are not actively seeking your product or service. Cold calling is a classic example: a sales person will often have a list of potential customers and he or she will contact each pitching the companies product or service. The customer has been identified, but has no immediate need or desire for the product, and you must tell them why they need your product if they do not have anything like it, or why you are better than the competition if they already have a rival product. This type of marketing focuses on the businesses unique selling point, and its an uphill battle because each customer must first believe that they need the product, and than they must be converted to a sale. Banner advertising is a common example, and averages .3-.8% conversion rate, which is much lower than paid search marketing which hovers around 1-3%.

Relationship Marketing is considered the new darling of the internet marketing space, and focuses on engaging customers who might not be ready to purchase, but have potential to purchase. Relationship marketing often takes months, or sometimes even years, for the engagement to result in a sale, and is reserved only for those who are willing to consistently invest with little upfront return. The most common form of modern relationship is social media marketing, where advertisers focus on strong content and engaging media to keep potential customers interested long enough until they have converted to a customer. Facebook advertising is considered both demand and relationship marketing, which is why companies have found slow success and often quickly give up. Successfully advertising on Facebook requires engaging content, steady time and monetary investment, and implicit conversion tactics. Relationship marketing’s successes are measured much differently than both lead or demand – if a potential customer interacts with the companies brand in any way, its considered a conversion. With Facebook, any “Like”, wall comment, or new fan of the companies Facebook page is considered a conversion.

After building a target customer profile, businesses must then find which strategy  fits their business. At that point, marketers should then delve into the various ad networks and build micro strategies around each platform. Hope this helps and let me know if anyone has questions!

When I was 16 (2004), my then online ecommerce store PurFiveAudio received a near traffic influx. It was a Sunday night and a media representative from Good Morning America contacted me and conducted a quick phone interview about teen entrepreneurship and inquired about my online store. The correspondent told me to brace for large amounts of traffic-the show wanted to do a live interview with me at 6AM the following morning via their San Francisco affiliate. After hanging up the phone I quickly called my web host, LunarPages, and told them of the possibly increase in traffic. Such web hosts who cram thousands of clients onto a single server have no way of managing traffic spikes, and after my tip of possibly server overload, the technician was helpless other than suggest I upgrade to a dedicated server. A grid-based server, such as MediaTemple’s (which I now use and highly recommend) is setup to handle traffic spikes and spread server loads over multiple computers. Although the technology is still new and is maturing, it is well worth the drawbacks. Having a grid-based host braces your website for high server loads, and avoids the unthinkable downtown when you often need it most: a Digg front page, a TechCrunch article, or other heavily populated blogs. Not being able to catch these new viewers is detrimental and mirrors or caches are not adequate substitutes and only hinder any concentrated readership or user growth.

After being technologically prepared for a traffic influx, the next step is to harness the spike by keeping the bounce rate low by encouraging these visitors to explore other pages on your website, and to capture these visitors and get them to return. If you have a blog, implementing the following techniques will give you a better chance of capturing a visitor:

1. Use the similar post plug-in for Wordpress. This is known to decrease the bounce rate 10-12% overnight, and your one hit post can double or even triple page views. Demonstrating value on more than one page on your website helps justify a repeat visit, and will increase the chances a visitor will bookmark or subscribe to your blog.
2. Use FeedBurner for RSS subscriptions. It’s the most popular and powerful way to push your RSS feed to visitors, and is the easiest to use as it has all of the popular subscription links on an external and trusted third-party website.
3. Setup your posts for comments. Try to leave your blog posts open for debate, end with a question. You want feedback, community interaction, and engagement. An engaged visitor will return to check on the comments, especially responses to their own comment.
4. Allow threaded comments. This is an option in WordPress and if you have a significant amount of commenters, which is likely if you are receiving significant amounts of traffic for a single blog post, it creates a forum-like atmosphere instead of a list of comments which hinders structured discussions. TechCrunch and Engadget have had increased comments after employing such techniques because it encouraged longer, more in-depth discussions instead of one-off comments.
5. Encourage word of mouth. If your website already has social media traction and momentum, keep the momentum. After the social media craze, services like ShareThis popped up which allow your visitors to share or save your content to their favorite social media websites. If each visitor shares your website with more than one person (a viral growth coefficient of greater than one), your on your way to exponential growth!

Hopefully these techniques will better brace your website for traffic influxes! Any other tips I left out?