September 2011 - Ontarget

Frequently, clients ask how to effectively use internet marketing. Let’s first look at some statistics. Research shows that people spend almost as much time on the Internet as they do watching TV. However, advertising spend for the Internet is one third of that spent on TV. Internet is still a new channel to some and thus the marketing budgets are still playing catch up. So in essence the amount of your marketing budget for the Internet should be roughly the same as that of TV. Now that we know what to spend how should someone go about spending that money on the Internet? The one area that just makes sense for any company is search marketing. There’s no doubt about it, people go to the search engines to look for products and even companies. I’m amazed how many people go to Google.com to type in the URL of a company. I’m not sure if they don’t know that you can do that in the address area directly or if they’re just conditioned to use their search engine for navigating through the Internet. Search marketing entails two general areas (SEO and Pay-Per-Click). SEO or search engine optimization is the art of making your site show up at the top of the organic listing when someone enters particular keywords. Pay-Per-Click (also called SEM orsearch engine marketing) involves coming up with a list of keywords that you’re willing to pay a cost for when someone clicks on your ad within the search engine and goes to your site. These ads are usually at the top and to the right of the search engine’s results page. Both of these are tactics that we recommend to every client. The days of looking up a company in the Yellow Pages are gone. Twenty years ago a company would never think about not listing in the Yellow Pages. Today the search engines have replaced that on our computers and mobile phones. We see a lot of companies that try to do SEO or PPC internally. If you basically have an interactive advertising agency in your company and continually replace those people when they leave your probably fine with doing it internally. We’ve always told clients you should build those things that you can compete on and provide you differentiation in your marketplace. You should buy/outsource everything else. It’s just not worth the internal hassle of running an interactive agency when you make air conditioners. SEO is not easy and there’s no guarantee. If you see someone offering you first page listing on your desired keywords, it’s a guarantee they can’t keep. A lot of people are using Google’s business listing within their city to provide first page organic results but it’s not full proof. I agree and we do list our client’s in all of the search engine’s business listing and I agree that’s the best way to rank high quickly. It just might not be on the keywords you want. PPC on the other hand is a great tool and cost effective if handled by a certified company. PPC can be turned on and off instantly. You can run seasonal promotions that have a start date and an end date. You cannot do that with SEO effectively. PPC isn’t the only part that figures into the cost per lead/sale (which is the most important thing). We create, manage and optimize landing pages for our clients within our PPC program. Once you get the prospect to your webpage you have to convince them to take the next step. Sending them to your home page and making them hunt for the specific information they just entered is not going to be successful. I hope this helps and if you have any questions just give us a call and we’d be happy to talk about all the benefits in detail.

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