Monday, 22 June 2009

What are the Advantages of Internet Based Marketing?

By Joe Cotroneo

Today I'll be telling you how and why Internet based marketing can give you more bang for your buck than the traditional offline advertising and marketing model. For example:

You go to your local newspaper and you tell them you want to place an ad. While there, you ask them how many readers they have or what are the circulation numbers - and they give you a round about number. You also ask, what the demographics are, and they give you a general answer, as they do not exactly know.

Then, let's say the place an ad in the classified section and then sit back and wait to see what happens. Now, to track this, you put a code on your website URL so you know exactly how many visitors you're getting from that one newspaper ad. With the phone number, you also include a code, so that you know where the calls are coming from.

You're also going to have to be patient. Your ad will go out in the next edition. Eventually, you'll start getting some calls and some additional traffic to your site. Compare this added interest with the cost for the advertisement. Say you got ten leads out of the ad, with the ad costing you about five dollars per visitor; this means your ad has cost you $50 in total.

In this example, we do very well and make one sale. Now, you may get other trickle in calls over the coming weeks, as often, people keep the newspaper and respond to an ad later.

Let's compare this with internet based advertising. First off, try a pay per click ad campaign. This allows you to narrowly target your campaign by using the keywords of your choice which you think are relevant to your product or service and that will attract visitors to your site. You can also try out more general keywords and see what results you get.

Your ad goes live within fifteen minutes, using Google as an example. You only pay for people who click on your link and in this case you are paying $1.00 per click. Let?s say you convert at 2%. So you spend $100 to make two sales.

Here, though, you can tell which keywords are converting to sales because you can use conversion tracking. Then, you can remove the keywords that aren't converting, so that your ad campaign is both more effective and more cost-efficient.

In addition, because you've also used broader keywords, you can see how many people are finding you with this "one size fits most" method. You can also place ads on other websites with exact demographic information, which will be extremely targeted to your business.

The main advantage to this internet based marketing model is the ability to closely track how your ads are performing. This allows you to maximize the revenue stream brought n by your campaign in a way traditional advertising never could.

By the way, pay per click is only one form of online marketing, there are many other effective marketing techniques you can use online, such as writing articles relative to your business, doing a press release, adverting in relevant online ezines and one of the most effective online marketing techniques is e-mail marketing, that is if it is done correctly.

Internet based marketing can keeps your advertising costs low while boasting better performance than print advertising campaigns. The tracking allows you to keep on top of your campaign and get information on its effectiveness almost instantly - and this kind of adaptability is just what your business needs in this competitive marketplace.

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1 comments:

tristancaleb said...

The key to having search engines generate significant traffic to your website is to understand the functioning of search engines on using them by the people and how the search engines rank sites on their index.

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