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.

Suppose that you want to place an advertisement in your local paper. You go to their offices and while there, you ask them two questions: firstly, what is their circulation? They will give you a ballpark figure. Secondly, you want to know the demographics of their readership. They will most likely guess here, as they cannot know for sure.

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.

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 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.

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.

Another point to make is that pay per click is only one way to advertise online. You can also use other cost-effective marketing techniques online, such as targeted article writing relevant to your business, writing a press release, and running advertisements in complementary online e-zines. Perhaps the most effective of these, though, is e-mail marketing, as long as it’s 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.