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.

Want to know what’s the single most important thing you can do to increase your conversion and grow your business? No, I’m not about to sell you on some insane program. This is vital stuff that you can and should be doing for low-cost or free.

Again and again search marketers tell their clients that they really, really need to track everything they do. Sadly a lot of the time this sage advice falls on deaf ears. If you’re new to the business the whys and wherefores of tracking everything you do online can be missed, to be sure.

But this subject is worth grappling with and I can’t think of a better example than Facebook, which is now worth a whopping $15 billion according to the (very reasonable) calculations of Danny Dover over at SEOmoz.org

Just for the sake of comparison, MySpace changed hands in 2005 for a mere $580 million, yet it has been around for much longer than Facebook, which is only five years old, and the MySpace user base was over 100 million as of 2006.

Now why should Facebook be worth so much more than any of the other social networking sites?

It’s all down to tracking. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has tracked everything his members do and stored that information.

So what?

Well just think for a moment how much more effective it would be if you wanted to place an ad on Facebook, and you could choose the age and gender of your target market. Not only that, but you could match your product to their interests (just to mention a few simple parameters of search). Just think how much you could increase your conversion rate by knowing these details and being able to target in this way.

Well, that’s the secret. That’s why advertising on Facebook is likely to be so much more effective than advertising on any of the other social marketing sites.

Now, almost certainly this information is going to have you rushing out to arrange for tracking of your site. Good idea. But before you do it take the time to shop around. If your web hosting doesn’t provide you with a range of comprehensive tracking tools (mine does: the button to HostGator is to your right over there), then go and sign up immediately with Google Analytics. Its free, you can track as many sites as you want, and you can even set some goals for yourself over there.

Stay tuned for a post on the best tracking tools out there in the next day or two.