Today I’ll be telling you how and why Internet based marketing can give you more bang for your buck than the traditional offline advertising and marketing model. For 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.

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.

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.

Here, though, you can tell which keywords are converting to sales because you can use conversion tracking. Then, you can remove the keywords that aren’t converting, so that your ad campaign is both more effective and more cost-efficient.

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 cut your costs; provide more information, enabling you to run better marketing campaigns. Additionally, the turn around time is faster and as a result you get better information sooner.

Tweet This Post