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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Posted under Internet Marketing
This post was written by Joe Cotroneo on June 29, 2009
