What are the Advantages of Internet Based Marketing?
Filed under Internet Marketing
In this article, I’ll discuss why Internet based marketing can give you a better return on your investment versus traditional, off-line marketing. Let’s start with an example.
Suppose that you want to place an advertisement in your local paper. You go to their offices and while there, you ask them two questions: firstly, what is their circulation? They will give you a ballpark figure. Secondly, you want to know the demographics of their readership. They will most likely guess here, as they cannot know for sure.
You go ahead and place your ad in the classifieds and hope for the best. You can try to track how many visitors you receive as a result of this ad by putting some code on your website to count visitors who came to your site from the URL in the ad. If there is a phone number in the ad, you can have a code included in the ad so that you can track where you are getting the calls form.
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.
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.
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 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.
If you’ve also used more general keywords, you can track how much traffic that this approach has netted you. On the other side of the coin, you’ll be able to place ads on websites whose readerships demographics match the market you’re targeting.
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 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.
