I
f you’ve been hesitant about launching a full-scale online marketing campaign up till now you may be ready to make the move given the present economic climate. Online advertising and marketing can be both more effective and a lot cheaper than the real-world equivalents.

As far as I’m concerned it no longer makes sense, either, to have all your eggs in one basket. At the very least, an online marketing campaign could open up your market to segments you’ve never considered before.

Moving Your Marketing Online

You can save a lot of money by drumming up more business online. Ian Lurie helps you avoid some pitfalls if this is your aim.

Below is a graph showing the comparative costs for getting your message in front of 1000 people. There’s no doubt that marketing online can be next-to-negligible when you compare it with magazines and TV.

It costs nothing but time to network on sites such as Twitter, StumbleUpon, FaceBook and Bebo (just to give you a few examples) but the rewards can be tremendous. Successful networking can mean your posts are read by hundreds, if not thousands of people. Intelligent networking is sincere networking that comes easily to you as you engage with people of your choice, yet it will do more than perhaps anything else online to project the image you want for yourself and your company. Yes, you really can use Facebook, Bebo and Twitter to grow your business at very little cost.

Proactive Reputation Management

People don’t realize, often to their cost, that what you say on Twitter or just about anywhere else online can get indexed by search engines and therefore may show up in a search for specific keywords. It’s important to bear this in mind when you engage: don’t lose your temper and don’t say anything anywhere online that you wouldn’t want the whole world ot see–the whole world may very well see it! you can read more about proactive reputation management here.

Placing Ads

To begin with–or until you get some serious networking going–you might want to consider placing ads on these huge social media sites: YouTube and FaceBook are great for this. You can purchase ads that target your main keywords and only pay for click-thrus, which is where someone actually sees your web page and not the ad itself, as with offline advertising.

Pay-Per-Click

Pay-per-click marketing can be highly effective when used in conjunction with expert on-site SEO. However, Google Adsense and other forms of PPC marketing are easy to understand but not quite so easy to get right from the beginning, so until you’re confident, I’d recommend hiring a PPC marketing company to help you get the mix right to start with. Otherwise you could end up spending a great deal for badly targeted clicks which is easy to do if you get your search terms wrong. Don’t discount PPC because you fear that margin for error though: the rewards can be astounding when conducted professionally.

To back that up, here’s a quote from Aaron Wall of SEObook:

It is scary to think how reliant many businesses have become on search, but search is big business. Google pulled in $5.19 billion in revenues in the 1st quarter of 2008, with $3.40 billion from Google’s websites. Advertisers would not spend that much unless they profit from it.

‘Change’ seems to be the predominant keyword for 2009. Changes are being felt on every level, and despite the slump, and despite the terrible start to the year I feel that many of them are positive ones.
OK, to start with I spose you’re wondering why I didn’t just say ‘my predictions for SEO in 2009?’ In short, I feel that SEO is becoming less and less a standalone issue and more and more an integral part of online marketing. More importantly, I feel that more so than ever before you will need to implement a multi-pronged online marketing strategy if you want to carve out a decent share of your niche market in the coming year.

So let’s get to it.

1. I predict that the beginning of Google’s downfall has, in fact, already started, and will begin to be detectable around the middle of 2009. It will take a few months for word of this to get around, and another few months for most people to grasp the fairly astounding implications.
2. Expect to spend a lot more time considering your niche because this will be of increased importance. Even more so than it has been in recent years. The Internet is huge and the only way that search engines can serve their visitors well is to break it all down into bite-sized chunks.
3. To this end, expect to see fewer and fewer webpages optimized for single-word search terms. Could it be that the time has come when long-tail search is actually more important than even two-word search terms? We shall see…
4. I feel that we will see more and more niches that actually are an ‘intersection’ between two niches: If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, then Karl Long might clarify it for you. But in any case, you should definitely read The Medici Effect (free download alert) because this concept is going to come into its own in 2009.
5. The time has gone where a marketer could just throw up a site and scare up some traffic. Social media is the way of the future. Online marketers will rely more and more on social media marketing for

Online branding
advertising
traffic
and even market research/product creation

6. We won’t see much evidence of the so-called economic slump online. Here’s just one survey that shows that only 25 percent of online marketers plan to cut their advertising budget in 2009:
7. Branding is going to be a lot more about who you network with and how they see you, than how many advertising bucks you’ve invested. This has already started to manifest: a famous case was the Motrin ad that was pulled because of the response from moms on Twitter. Here’s another site that talks about how important it is to network in order to grow your business.

It will be interesting to look back at the end of 2009 to see how close this list was, and to also take a look at some other marketing predictions for 2009. Do hope you’ll join me in December for that.