For today’s business owners the practice of implementing effective methods of both on and offline marketing are changing at an ever growing rate. The main cause stems from the fact that both on and offline small business internet marketing has a multitude of options that can become extremely difficult to navigate.
Today’s challenging economic environment is really putting small business owners to task when it comes to earning above average incomes.
My main goal today is to help small business owners with their offline and online web marketing strategies. Hopefully this will instill confidence, thus allowing the business owner to move forward with a solid plan that can be implemented easily and effectively. And also I would like to show them a way to generate an additional revenue stream, further solidifying the financial stability of their business.
First off I would like to take a look at some of the most common internet marketing advertising methods and challenges associated with them:
1. Pay Per Click Advertising. This is when you place ads that are extremely targeted towards your demographic market. You pay a certain amount each time a prospect clicks on one of your ads. These types of internet marketing advertisements can produce rapid results. The most well-known companies that have these advertising marketing advertising networks include: Google, Ask, MySpace, Bing, MSN, Miva, etc. What makes these types of advertising platforms so difficult is their frequency of changing algorithms. The advertisier can have a highly search engine optimized ad campaign running with great success. But once the algorithms are changed, no longer are the web marketing ads effective.
2. Web 2.0 marketing A.K.A. Social Marketing 2.0. This is where you join social networking site such as Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, Hub Pages, etc. You set up your personal profile with the goal of finding like-minded individuals. This way you are developing a list of targeted followers that have the same demographics as yourself. The reason this is so important is that sooner or later you will sent targed ads out to the followers. This is called monetizing your list. It just makes sense that you try to develop a list of followers such as yourself taht you can market to. Draw backs of this system are the long amount of time it takes to develop a large list of followers. Not only that, but trends come and go. There’s no telling how much longer they’ll be popular.
3. You can place ads on classified sites like Craigslist, Backpage, Kijiji, etc. The hard part is spending hours each day placing these ads. It seems as if everyone else on these sites are doing the exact same thing: trying to sell something and having no interest in buying anything from your internet business.
4. Advertising offline: This is where you place ads in Newspapers, tv, magazines, etc. The good thing is your ad can be shown to many prospects. The bad news is it can be extremely expensive to advertise in the various periodicals. Your ad is usually shown to a wide segment of society and not targeted at all. Not only that, but once you submit your ad to the media company it can take forever for your ad to be seen. What I mean by that is: say your ad is shown in a magazine that is published in March. You will have to have your ad submitted and paid for weeks if not months in advance. It can take months to see a return on your investment.
Now that we’ve reviewed some of the more common offline and web marketing methods, I feel it best to move on to some relatively unknown marketing strategies that can produce results that are both rapid and lucrative.
1. Fax Broadcasting: Many don’t know this, but you can send targeted fax broadcasts to those that are good prospects for your goods and services. This type of internet marketing advertising is extremely cost-effective and reaches your target market in a short amount of time.
2. Send out Postcards in the mail. You probably don’t realize it, but over the years you have started to receive less and less mail. Many of your competitors have ventured onto the internet as a way to get customers. This is good news for you. Now you can reach your target market thru the mail with little to no competition. Besides that, most customers just love having a card in their hands they can connect with.
3. Email Marketing: Due to the 2003 Can Spam Act this marketing method has lost some of it’s sizzle in recent years. Especially for those that don’t know how to do correctly. You see, if you broadcast your message to a large, annonymous audience you most likely will end up with little if any results. However, if you send out a smaller broadcast to a list of people that have requested information on whatever it is you’re selling. You will be astounded at the high level of response.
About the author: Wayne Hinrichs has ran a profitable small business internet marketing company for the last half decade. He enjoys assisting others with this complex task. web marketing is the most important factor in determining a companies profitability. As an owner knows how to get their message out to their target market, the other parts of the business becomes rather easy.