Tuesday, June 30, 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.

In the interim, you wait for your ad to go out on the next edition of the newspaper. After a week, you start to get some traffic and calls, and then you measure that against the price of your ad. You may find that with ten leads, the ad is costing $5.00 per visitor with a total ad cost of $50.00.

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.

Now, let's take an Internet advertisement example by comparison. For this one, you start a pay per click campaign. With this method, you determine what keywords are relative to your service or product. You can get as targeted as you want and you can put a few keywords in a broad category, too, to see what keywords you might be missing out on when you try to snare everyone in your market.

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.

However the advantage here is that you can track which keywords are leading to keywords, and which are not and refine your ad campaign accordingly to maximize your conversions.This makes your campaign more cost effective, not to mention bringing in more sales than a newspaper ad.

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.

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.

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 significantly reduce your costs. It can also provide more information that lets you run more efficient and better marketing campaigns. In addition, your turnaround time is faster so that you get better information much sooner than you do with traditional venues.

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