"Moai Media offers a complete host of e-commerce services that will help you realize your online ambitions"
We have listed below the most commonly used services that we offer. There are literally hundreds of additional services, strategies, and products that can be leveraged to build your business in the online arena. They all have benefits and drawbacks, and which will work best for your company largely depends on your business type and ambitions. Moai Media will work with you to build a comprehensive plan that fits your budget and realize your online goals.
It goes without saying that if you wish to engage online consumers you must have an online portal. How this portal takes shapes depends on the type of business and the online revenue channels available to it. What might not be so obvious is that there is more to a website or e-commerce store than just a listing of products and services. A site must…
• Convey the story and message of your business
• Display your product and services in an easy to browse manner
• Provide the consumer with all the correct indicators that gain a person’s trust
• The site must be structured to the requirements of search engine standards
• Maximize conversion rates
• Minimize the cost and effort required to maintain the site
Knowing how to implement the above is what makes the difference between a web designer and an e-commerce specialist. Moai Media has 30 years combined experience in blending all required aspects of effective e-commerce design with your business’s story and goals.
All of our site design, regardless of budget, have the following features
• Custom tailored to your business type, story, and goals
• Uses most recent programming standards
• Ground up design to take full advantage of SEO
• Privately hosted to ensure your data and customer base remains your own
An online presence is definitely a key element in leveraging the internet to grow your business. However, simply having a site is not the beginning, middle, and end of realizing your online goals. The internet is not an automated machine that you can just plug your products and services into and start making money hand over fist with no additional effort. The days of a teenager plugging away at his keyboard making “5 million dollars IN JUST 3 MONTHS!!!” are largely in the past, if they existed in the first place.
Having a website is a kin to throwing a message in a bottle into a sea of messages in bottles. Today every business is online vying for the attention of web users. You need to stand above this competitors by attracting the eyes of internet users. The most sustainable way to do this is through Search Engine Optimization. SEO is the practice of structuring your site to specifications that Yahoo, Bing, and Google can categorize and consider optimum for a well built site with relavent content.
While keywords and metadata still play a role in search engine ranking, they are no longer the sole indicators of a properly developed website. There are a whole host of items that determine search ranking including but not limited to: keyword density, incoming links, site load times, asset file size, file structure, and code compliance. These requirements cannot be met with separate design, develop, and marketing companies. A designer is unlikely to be concerned about file names and asset sizes, a developer is unlikely to be aware of SEO requirements that are not directly impacted by the websites functionality, and a marketing company is likely
going to have hire a 3rd party programmer to make corrections to a website’s code. Moai Media builds every clients website completely in house, keeping SEO in mind throughout design, programming and setup.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Pay Per Click (PPC) are the most effective forms of online marketing, and are used by companies large and small to grow their customer base. Consumers that are actively using Bing, Yahoo, and Google to search for products and services are the type of online consumer to most likely have “intent to buy”. Due to the nature of internet search terms, a properly implemented SEM strategy can be used to zero in on those that have “intent to buy” and convert them into shoppers.
SEM is a straight forward tool to promote your business. When an internet user inputs a search term for a particular product into a search engine, the keywords used will determine what content and ads are displayed to the internet user. If these ads are relevant to what the user is searching for, they will click through the ad to your site. At this point it is up to the quality of your site to convert this browser to a shopper.
Traditional media types like print, radio, TV, have you paying for viewership regardless of the actual performance of the ad. With SEM you are only paying for those people who come to your site searching specifically for your products and services. An addition benefit of online marketing over traditional media is that all traffic from SEM campaigns can be tracked from beginning to end and used to optimize the SEM campaign for greatest ROI.
Email marketing is one of the “oldest” forms of online marketing today. It may not have the same “intent to buy” factor as SEM, but it makes up for this in being extremely cheap. Where SEM conversions may cost 50%+ the avg purchase price, an email can be sent for as little as 5 cents. A properly targeted data set combined with a website designed around customer acquisition makes it possible to see conversion rates as high as 50% or more.
Email marketing starts with a data list that is tailored to the demographics of your business clientele. Email blasts are sent out to this list in chunks at a time. The email sent introduces your business and has a call to action directing the recipient to your site or specially designed landing page. Similar to SEM, once the consumer clicks through to your site it is up to the quality of the site to convert them into a shopper.
Paying for email marketing works differently than SEM, where as SEM is paid out on a per click basis to a search engine or other PPC partner, email marketing is run in house and costs are associated to specific design, software, and other technical requirements.
Affiliate marketing is relatively new, having hit its stride hand in hand with blogging at the turn of the century. Affiliate marketing is considered a nice middle ground in terms of costs. You incur a cost only when a sale is generated, and the technical requirements are a lot lower than that of email marketing.
Affiliate marketing works similarly to commissioned based sales. A website owner, newsletter manager, YouTube celebrity or any other organization that has captured an audience can generate revenue by signing up for your affiliate marketing program. They become a champion of your products and services, promoting those items to their audience, and in return they receive a percentage of the sale.
Unlike SEM, which incurs a cost no matter if a user buys or not and email marketing which incurs costs simply from operational expenses, with affiliate marketing you do not incur a cost unless a product is sold. This cost is usually a percentage ranging somewhere in the 5% to 25% range depending on the volume of product the affiliate can move. Due to the distributed nature of affiliate marketing, huge sales increases can be realized through this channel of online marketing.
Social media marketing is one of the newest forms of online marketing. Some will say it is an offshoot of PPC marketing due to most Social Media platforms implementing some form of click ads. While this is true, the real power of social marketing is the ability to engage the consumers on a personal basis. This word of mouth “buzz”, or personal recommendation, is more effective than more formal forms of promotion methods.
Social media marketing functions more like SEO than any of the three previously described marketing channels. With social media marketing you are reaching out to communities on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Foursquare, Reddit, etc and contributing to these communities as both a member with like interests, and as a business offering products and services that fit the lifestyle of the community members.
Costing for this channel of marketing varies wildly as there are many strategies that can be leveraged in social media marketing. Social media account management is billed out similar to copywriting, “friend” attracting is usually billed similar to a SEM campaign or SEO campaign, where as contests & specials might have a hard cost similar to web design for tab & landing page creation.
Media buying online largely functions as it does with traditional media, with one exception. When buying traditional media traffic sources, you largely have to take the publishers word on the quality of the publications demographics and readership. With online sources of traffic you can track each user from its originating source down to individual products and pages visited on your site. The data created from an online media buy will tell you, without a doubt, if a given source of traffic is worth continuing to pursue. Using years of experience Moai Media will create a media buying strategy that will see the greatest ROI.
There are more ways to leverage the online arena than just your individual efforts. The online world contains thousands of online tools and organizations that can be leveraged to help you expand your online efforts.
• Online Retailers
• Product Aggregators
• Flash sale sites
• Review sites
• Social Media Celebrities
These are just a small selection of a myriad of partner types than can be leveraged for your company. Moai Media uses decades of online expertise to help leverage online 3rd party partners to help expand your business.
An e-commerce site has a number of elements that will need managed. The site itself will need updates and optimization, content generation for the blog & social media accounts, SEM & Affiliate marketing campaigns, to name just a few. Managing a fully realized e-commerce store can be daunting to the inexperienced. It also may not make business sense to hire on an entire staff of e-commerce experts until said online efforts can support the expense a full in house staff entails. Moai Media can manage all of your e-commerce backend needs, leaving you to focus on your core competencies. When the time is right for your business, we will work with you to transition over to in house expertise.
One of the greatest assets of conducting business online is that it produces large amounts of data. This data comes from all sources, organic search engine traffic, affiliate traffic, SEM campaigns, media buys, everything that brings traffic to your site. Virtually every effort taken online can be tracked, analyzed and used to optimize not only your online efforts but your core business as well.
Data analysis is at the core of Moai Media’s competencies. We can help you leverage new or existing data to not only grow your online business but to help your business remain agile in the current economy.