What are the Advantages of Internet Based 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!