Advantages of Internet Based Marketing
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.
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.
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.
With the above example, let’s say that we make one sale. And of course, you may get other calls over the coming weeks. Oftentimes, people don’t respond to a newspaper ad until a bit after it’s run.
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 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.
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.