The Advantages Of Internet Marketing With internet becoming more and more available and affordable, there’s no wonder that so many people use it to stay connected to their network of friends. This is why internet marketing has become a must for any business that wants to be effective and successful.
There are some advantages to internet marketing classic marketing can’t compete with. One of these advantages is the price. Reaching your target market online is much cheaper than reaching them through print, outdoor or radio. TV might be cheaper in terms of cost per GRP, but overall, a business needs to spend big amounts of money on TV advertising in order to achieve enough visibility.
Online promotional materials are much cheaper than real life ones. If you publish an electronic brochure, you pay the same price whether it gets 1000 downloads or 100,000 downloads. If you print the same brochure, the two costs will be very much different. Paper is expensive, distribution is expensive, therefore going online allows a business to make significant savings from their marketing budgets.
Online advertising is flexible. One can set up a SEM campaign and choose how much to bid and what keywords. The daily budget can be also set to your maximum affordable limit. All parameters can be adjusted and those adjustments become effective the moment you save them into the system. If you want, let’s say, to target only customers from Texas, because your business is local, you can choose to have your ads displayed only to people who access the internet from Texas.
Online marketing has this social component that helps a lot. People like to share news and cool stuff with their friends on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and other social networking websites. If your offer catches their attention, they might serve as messengers and marketing agents for you and promote your products or services to their acquaintances and friends. This is a power nobody should underestimate. Under the right circumstances, a very well thought piece of advertising can skyrocket your sales and boost your popularity to huge levels.
Facebook marketing allows a very narrow segmentation. You can target, for instance, only women, 25-45, married, interested in scrapbooking. Facebook makes it possible for businesses to setup their campaigns in such a way that ads are shown only to people belonging to the selected target group.
Internet marketing has another advantage: it is international. You can sit on your deck in Alabama and reach customers from Germany or wherever else in the world you may want.
Although the entry barrier in internet marketing is pretty low, the learning curve can be quite steep. You’ll need time and a series of trials and errors before you learn the tricks of the trade. If you don’t have the time to educate yourself, you can hire an internet marketing consultant to put your business online and handle all these things for you. Such consultants are not very expensive and if you find a really good one, you might be impressed with the results.
