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December 2007 > How to Be E-relevant
How to Be E-relevant
Every small business owner conducting Internet advertising confronts the same problem: How do I target my company’s products or services to the right consumers with pinpoint accuracy to get the best return on investment?
The key for online advertisers is to drive qualified traffic to your site and be a resource to your visitors. You should be adding updated content while encouraging impulse purchases – taking advantage of the direct response nature of the Internet, says Mitchell Johnson, president of dBase Media LLC, a McLean, Va.-based online marketing consulting company, and a GotVMail customer.
“This medium is all about seeing and being able to respond immediately. Our preferred channel to reach new customers is search engine marketing. These are people with their wallets out and credit card in hand, and they are just looking for the person with the right product. They’re folks who are proactively seeking your products,” Johnson says. “You should encourage your visitors to sign up for email news, specials, discounts etc., and use meaningful emails to recycle visitors back to your site.”
dBase Media has provided online marketing solutions for many name-brand advertisers in the travel/tourism, electronics/entertainment, higher education and political issue/advocacy industries.
Johnson advises any new company to consider search engine marketing as a way to promote their Web site and products.
Effective targeting
Here’s how paid search engine advertising works. Search engine providers like Google AdWords or Yahoo! Search Marketing allow companies to bid on keywords that would result in a consumer finding their company’s Web site. It used to be that the more money they bid, the higher their company will rank in a search result. Now, the effectiveness of the ad copy is just as important. The top engines consider the click-through-rate (a rate measuring how many users click on an ad compared to the number of impressions) and bid rate in determining where to rank the ads.
What makes this effective is that it’s targeted directly to your prospects.
“Most small companies have a limited ad budget,” Johnson says. “The beauty of the search engine marketing is you can run it for as little as a few dollars a day and be able to track the results back to that ad and most productive keywords and it can make your return on investment better. The interfaces are intuitive and it’s not hard to figure out.”
He adds, “It’s also something that’s very scaleable to large or small budgets, and the turnaround time is instantaneous.”
Other online opportunities
dBase Media also helps companies with email marketing campaigns, display advertising (including both text and graphic banner ads), and collecting opt-in consumer data for lead generation.
While some companies have found Internet podcasts to be a successful online tool, Johnson thinks the medium for advertisers is “somewhat limited.”
“With podcasting, you take an audio message and download it to a device, and you kind of need the customer to react and respond to it. It’s not a direct response, impulse kind of medium,” Johnson says.
One trend to watch is the growing use of vertical social networks, or what Johnson calls “mini-Facebooks” that allow companies to promote their brands and network with customers.
By the Numbers
The number of unique visitors to Google’s advertising network in October 2007, reaching 74% of the U.S. online market.
Source: comScore Media Metrix
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