What are the Advantages of Internet Based Marketing?
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:
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.
So you place the ad in the classified section and wait to see what happens. By the way, on your ad you put a code on your website URL so you know how many visitors you are getting from that ad, and second, with the phone number you also add a code, so 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.
With this example, your ad goes live within just 15 minutes, using, let’s say, Google. You don’t pay unless people click on your link; if they do, you pay a dollar. Let’s say that your conversion rate is 2%. This means that 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.
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 cut your costs; provide more information, enabling you to run better marketing campaigns. Additionally, the turn around time is faster and as a result you get better information sooner.
