Archive for March, 2009:
Online Marketing Campaign A Jump Start To Success
In the internet age, having an online marketing campaign should be one of your top priorities. That’s a broad, sweeping statement, but it’s a broad sweeping truth. I don’t care if you’re a Fortune 500 company or the owner of auto shop in Podunk, Wisconsin, you need to be online, and you need to have an online marketing campaign.
The days when you could get by without having an internet presence might not be dead, but they’re definitely circling the drain. Virtually everyone has a cell phone these days, what we still refer to as a cell phone is really a mobile connection to the internet. People are constantly connected, and people are constantly using this connection to find the place and things they want to find.
If you don’t have an online marketing campaign in place, you are not going to be there to find. If you aren’t there to find, you are going to watch your business eventually dry and blow away. You need to be online, and you need be online with a strategy in place. I’m going to show you how to create a simple, effective and inexpensive online marketing campaign.
The very first step is to make sure that you have a nice, professional looking website. You’d be shocked at how many businesses pay good money to put cheap looking websites on line. Good, attractive design is important, and it won’t cost you extra. It should also be consistent with the look of your business in general, including stationery and business cards.
The next step is to make sure that your website is search engine optimized. This is a big subject, but the basic idea is make sure that your site makes it as easy as possible for the search engines to put you at the beginning of their results for the keywords that your customers will be using. You can have a beautiful website and an excellent business, but without search engine optimization, you won’t get anywhere.
The next step in a good online marketing campaign is to make sure your website is capturing potential customer’s email addresses. You’ll need to set up an autoresponder service to make use of this, but they’re cheap and easy to use. Just make sure you offer your customers some reason to give their email addresses. It may not be using money, but it is still a transaction, and you need to give good value.
This allows you to interact with customers and give them multiple chances to buy from you, in addition to keeping your business in their minds. The next time they want what you offer, you’re going to be the first person they think.
Once you have all that in place, you can experiment with using online advertising. There are lots of ways to this, from banner advertising, which is generally ineffective, to sponsoring a blog or website, which can be expensive, to pay per click, which is usually the best place to start. Pay per click puts a small ad related to whatever a person searching for next to their search engine results. You see this every time you use Google. You can use this to get visitors to your site, and if you have followed the above steps, turning them into customers.
There you go; you should be well on your way to you first online marketing campaign. These techniques are simple, but they can explode your business and put money in your pocket. Don’t wait to get started, because your competition might already be working on it.
Tags: online marketing campaign, online marketing
Whats Killing Your Advertising Business Internet Marketing Is
This is a rough time to be in the advertising business. Internet marketing is pushing it out of the way, people are way too overstimulated, nobody is spending and, of course, there’s that pesky recession to think about.
You may not have noticed, but this Google thing has become kind of a big deal. The company itself is worth somewhere around 200 billion dollars, and it’s continuing to grow. You may also notice that the company offers almost all of its services for free. That’s because most of those things aren’t really its business.
No, Google is in the advertising business, internet marketing style. What Google realized early on and profited immensely from is the fact that people are looking for stuff. Yes, I know this seems obvious, but give me a minute and I’ll explain.
There was a time when advertising was dominated by a few big companies, spending millions of dollars on ad campaigns to reach millions of people in the hopes that some percentage of those people, hopefully a large one but probably a small one, would actually buy their products. Google wasn’t really interested in those people.
Google realized that there were millions of businesses, and if they could offer lots of businesses lots of way to reach customers for pennies, they could make a lot of money. Billions. And since they knew that there were lots of people searching for lots of things, they were in a position to dominate the advertising business. Internet marketing wasn’t born with them, but it did grow with them.
This method of connecting hungry customers with ready businesses really is a revolution in the advertising business. Internet marketing means that you don’t have to fight with other advertisers trying to sift the great hordes of people who don’t want to listen to you to begin with, trying to find that one person who actually wants what you have.
There are two sides of internet marketing; finding that hungry customer, and building relationships. The hungry customer part is the obvious one. If someone is searching for a way to stop feline incontinence and you have a way to stop feline incontinence, then it should be obvious that rather than shouting to the masses about what you have, you should be talking with the person who already wants what you have. The internet allows you do this, usually for pennies.
The other aspect is not as obvious, although you almost certainly have seen it done. That’s the conversation side of it. If you use Amazon, you’ve seen one of the masters of this at work. Amazon doesn’t just sell to you; they make an effort to get to know you, to offer things they think you might like, to listen to what you’re saying. They don’t use an advertising business, internet marketing is what they use to get to the top.
You can do this, too. And you should do this too. You need to put a fence around your customers to stop them from wandering off, and to make sure you’re giving them what they want and need.
If you’re running an advertising business and want to survive all the problems you’re going to face, you need to be in the business of offering these new ways to clients, to show them how to find that hungry customer and keep them. You know what going to save your advertising business? Internet marketing.
Tags: advertising business, internet marketing
