Pittsburgh Study: Traditional Marketing Versus Online Marketing
If you have a limited marketing or advertising budget – say less than $10K – don’t waste your money on traditional forms of advertising: the newspaper ads, the television and radio spots, the direct mail pieces. Those forms of advertising are dead. At the least I can hear their ugly gurgling death rattle with each canceled newspaper subscription and with each because-I-don’t-want-to-have-to-listen-to-the-stupid-commercials TiVo purchase.
What’s more, these ad venues are very expensive. Extremely so. A small ad in the daily paper can cost a couple of hundred dollars. And that’s just for a one-day run. If you’ve ever priced out a tv or radio spot, I’m sure you asked the rep not for a pen to sign the contract, but for some antacid to calm you stomach.
Online marketing is different.
Ask your marketing company to write and distribute some search engine optimized web content articles. Basically, these are articles of 500 words or so about a topic of your choosing, sprinkled with a good dose of keywords used by your target market when they go to a search engine such as Google or Yahoo. “Pittsburgh marketing company” is an example of a keyword search term. Information about how to get a hold of your company also is featured within the article.
If your marketing company has done its research and used highly optimized keywords within the article, the work will pop up on search engine’s results and your target audience will be able to click on the link and read the information – with your company’s contact information squarely in sight.
You pay your marketing firm for this work – the search term research, the writing, the distribution – just once. But your article will be found by the search engines for years.
Just ask a newspaper or radio spot to do that!
If you’re keen on having a more traditional ad campaign online, you can do that too. You can ask your online marketing company to run a “pay-per-click” campaign, where you pay Google or Yahoo or another search engine a certain amount of cash each time someone clicks on your link on the search engine. You’ve seen these many times yourself. They appear at the top of a search page – highlighted in light yellow on Google, for example – or in a column on the right side of your search results.
Pay-per-click can be a cost effective online marketing campaign because it’s highly targeted toward people who are interested in your service or product. You’re not wasting your marketing budget on people who have no interest in what you offer.
Here at Eyeflow, we’ve been putting together some great – if I do say so myself – online marketing campaigns for Pittsburgh-area, national and international firms for six years. We’re experts in search engine optimization, link-building, website design, web portals – you name, we’ve done it. You need it, we’ll do it.
Posted in Internet Marketing, SEO Resources, Pay Per Click Marketing |
April 2nd, 2008 at 11:14 am
So late to the convo, here. Just catching up on my reader.
“Those forms of advertising are dead.”
Thems fightin’ words in a lot of communities. I’ve had the opportunity to work with companies that handle both traditional and new media. Honestly, I cringe every time I hear an SEO/internet marketer say traditional media is dead.
SEOs are so focused on what they do, they aren’t paying attention to what Joe Shmoe is doing down the block.
SEMPO revealed that 25% of people don’t know how to do a Google search. SEMPO Survey
Despite the proliferation of DVRs, 95% of TV viewing is live.
What it comes down to is your audience. You have to reach them where they are. If you’re trying to sell to a demographic of retirees…investing all your dough in SEO/online marketing might not be the best idea.
Online marketing is so great because its measurable and has an awesome ROI, but it also has its place just like TV and print. If you have less than 10K, I think you should take time to look at the full picture before disregarding an entire form of media/communication.
With my admittedly few experiences with television, I’ve found that they have several options to work within budgets. And the targeting resources Comcast has are unbelievable.