Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Internet Based Marketing

By Joe Cotroneo

In this article, I am going to go over a few key points as to why internet based marketing will give you a better return on your investment over that of offline marketing. Let?s begin with an example.

Let's say that you go to your local newspaper and tell them that you want to place an ad with them. While you're there, you ask what their circulation is (their number of readers). They give you an estimate. You also ask them what their demographics are. They give you a general answer, because they don't really 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.

Now, of course, you need to wait and have your ad go out in the next newspaper edition. After about a week, you start to get some calls and some website traffic. You measure that against what your ad cost you. You might find that with 10 leads, the ad is costing you five dollars a visitor, for a final ad cost of $50.

Now suppose one of these leads converted into a sale. You may get some more calls of course over the next few weeks. Responses to print advertisements sometimes take a while.

In the next example, let?s say you start a Pay per click campaign. Using this method, you research keywords that are relative to your product or service. You can get as targeted as you want, plus you can leave a few keywords in the broad category to see if there are other keywords you may be missing when trying to capture this market.

With pay per click, you ad is up and being viewed in minutes by millions of people using Google, in this example. Best of all, you only pay when people click on the link in your ad!Suppose that you pay a dollar per click and have a conversion rate of 2% - you will spend $50 per sale that you make.

However in this example because of conversion tracking you can tell which keywords are converting to sales and cut out the keywords that do not convert making your ad campaign more cost efficient and effective.

You can also tell with the broader keywords how exactly people are finding you. Additionally, you can place ads on other websites with exact demographic information which are highly targeted to your business.

What's the point of all this? Basically, when you compare advertising in traditional venues such as the newspaper with online advertising, you can measure your performance with online advertising much more efficiently.

Another point to make is that pay per click is only one way to advertise online. You can also use other cost-effective marketing techniques online, such as targeted article writing relevant to your business, writing a press release, and running advertisements in complementary online e-zines. Perhaps the most effective of these, though, is e-mail marketing, as long as it's 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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