Monday, June 29, 2009

What are the Advantages of Internet Based Marketing?

By Joe Cotroneo

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.

You go to your local newspaper and you tell them you want to place an ad. While there, you ask them how many readers they have or what are the circulation numbers - and they give you a round about number. You also ask, what the demographics are, and they give you a general answer, as they do not exactly 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.

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 pay per click, you ad is up and being viewed in minutes by millions of people using Google, in this example. Best of all, you only pay when people click on the link in your ad!Suppose that you pay a dollar per click and have a conversion rate of 2% - you will spend $50 per sale that you make.

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.

Of course, pay per click is only one form of online advertising. There are many others which are very effective such as article marketing, advertising in ezines which appeal to your target demographic and putting out press releases. Email marketing is one of the best methods out there, if properly done.

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.

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