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December 2007 > Go Online to Empower Your Traditional Marketing
Go Online to Empower Your Traditional Marketing
Marketing is about communication. What is the Web but a worldwide medium for communication? But the Web’s capacity to impact marketing isn’t just about the ease of communication, or even its advantage in highly targeted, inexpensive, easily monitored interactions. There’s another, less obvious aspect to the Web when it comes to marketing — its ability to help small businesses do it better, more efficiently, and less expensively than ever before. Here are four ways to harness the power of the Web for online marketing.
Search engine advertising
Search engines remain the primary way people locate information on the Web, so even your offline ads need an online component that can get potential customers to your site. For small businesses, Google Adwords is the gold standard for developing affordable ads that reach people who are expressing interest in your product.
Here’s how it works: you choose keywords (“mechanic”) or phrases (“Houston auto mechanic”), and when someone searches on those words on Google’s site, your business will come up under “Sponsored Links” on the right side. The advantage for a small business: you can tell Google what you’ll pay for each sponsored link, based on your budget and you only pay when someone actually clicks on your ad. Plus, you can limit your results to certain geographies, helping you complement your existing “local” advertising. Be aware that if someone bids more than you do on a keyword, their link appears higher than yours. So it may be costly to purchase a high position for a popular word such as “clocks” but less costly to get a more specific phrase such as “antique cuckoo clock repair.”
Easier radio ad placement
Google AdWords doesn’t just work online. Many small businesses build their ad budgets around local radio, and Google has set up an online ordering system – called Google Audio Ads – to facilitate the purchase of radio ads on any of 1,600 terrestrial radio stations. Why? According to the Radio Ad Effectiveness Lab, 57% of people who listen to the radio while using the Internet look up items on the Web after hearing about them on the radio. The system handles everything from geography, length of campaign, time of day, station formats, demographics, and even reporting of results. Google also has compiled a network of professionals if you need help creating the commercial.
As with AdWords, a small business can set a budgetary limit to the campaign. You can also bid on the amount you will pay to reach each 1,000 listeners; the application will offer suggestions on what you should bid to get the desired slots. And it works. Read how we used AudioAds here at GotVMail.
Harness marketing best practices
Metcalfe’s Law postulates that the value of a network increases exponentially as the number of users increase. Marketing Sherpa, a research firm specializing in marketing, applies this logic by surveying its readership of marketing, advertising and PR professionals, as well as their customers and prospects. It then compiles and analyzes the information to reveal trends, and makes those reports available to its membership (currently around 237,000). Membership currently runs around $400, but non-members can still access some of the results (as published on the Sherpa blog), as well as tips and insights in articles from marketing experts, that are freely posted on the site for seven days.
Post a podcast
The Web is no longer simply a “reading” medium – video and audio feeds are just as important to getting your message out. The good news: podcasts (online shows that can be downloaded to a computer or listened to on an MP3 player) are easy and inexpensive to produce. Be brazen – ask an expert in your field to spend ten minutes on the phone with you for an interview; they get exposure and you get insight no one else has. Then post the chat to your site where customers can download it. Learn more about creating a podcast from Apple.
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
GotVMail News
GotVMail was named a "Rising Star" in Deloitte's 2007 National Technology Fast 500 list as one of the fastest-growing young companies in North America. Read the full press release.
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