Online Marketing vs. Traditional Media – Why Merchants Should Focus Online

March 20, 2009 by

There are many ways to generate business for your company, but what are the best ways to do so in the current ecomonic climate? Traditional media like TV, Radio, and Print are really struggling right now and will likely continue to do poorly at gain advertising dollars. “Branding” is out, and measurable ROI is in. Putting your advertising budget into online advertising is the way to go for a variety of reasons. Of course you have to do it properly so you can gauge the effectiveness of your online campaigns. Here are some of the best ways you can leverage online marketing to increase business.

Affiliate marketing is one of the best ways to grow your traffic and revenue. The great part about affiliate marketing is that it’s on a strictly performance basis, which means you only pay a commission when a sale or lead occurs. Affiliate marketing is still a growing and thriving industry so the more resources you put into it the more you will get out of it. But simply launching an affiliate program is not going to get you there. Your affiliate program needs to be managed properly, with the right techniques and methods. Most companies make the mistake of not allocating enough resources to their affiliate management or in growing their affiliate program. Personally I prefer the Commission Junction Affiliate Network for launching and managing large-scale affiliate programs. They have the most affiliates and best platform for management.

Search is another source of traffic that should always be improving and growing for your company. Putting resources and dollars into improving your SEO is always money well spent if you do it properly. There are many SEO firms that will vie for your business, but doing your on-site SEO internally is always the way to go in my opinion. Having a well-optimized website, with good meta-tags and on-page content is a must for maximizing your search rankings. Adding additional pages of unique content to your site, like articles and blog posts, is a great way to expand your organic SEO reach. Building out your site with more pages of unique content is a great strategy and something that should be done on a daily basis ideally.

Another great way to maximize your online traffic is to put together partnerships with other ecommerce companies. By approaching other online merchants you can put together deals to promote each other’s website through mediums like: newsletter placements, solo emails, site placements, and other sponsorships. This can all be done on an affiliate basis, with each company earning revenue when actions occur. This takes a lot of business development, but well worth it when you get a good sized company promoting your offer to their customer database.

Perhaps the best feature of running online campaigns is the fact that you can track the effectiveness of each online campaign. Being able to see exactly how well or not well the traffic is converting from a particular source is invaluable at making decisions about how much to spend with that traffic source. This is where online marketing is better in this economic climate than traditional media. Also, most companies aren’t usually maximizing their SEO, PPC, or affiliate channels because of various reasons. But in this day and age more emphasis should be placed on maximizing all of your company’s online marketing channels.

All and all, I think companies should be putting the majority of their advertising budgets into online marketing. It has to be managed well and done properly to get the best results, and this may take some trial and error to get it right. Once you are maximizing your ad dollars on the Internet you can look for other online traffic sources to test out. You should always be looking for new campaigns to test on a very controlled basis. My advice: anyone trying to sell you a CPM campaign should be hung-up on immediately! Push hard for cost-per-sale or cost-per-lead campaigns and don’t relent. I look forward to your feedback on the issue of online marketing vs. traditional media.

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Viewing 5 Comments

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    There are many ways to generate business for your company,but the best way is internet Marketing.Which would help to generate good amount of traffic and also create a presence in the search engines.For more information please visit:http://www.expertadvertisingso...

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    The above mentioned observations are generally on point. However Internet branding is not dead, the methodologies are simply changing. While Commission Junction is impressive, it is only one of hundreds of Affiliate Marketing options. Yes, SEO is powerful, but getting it right is exceedingly difficult for most companies to accomplish in-house.

    Branding… Consider the moment you are about to book a cruise, reserve an airline ticket, buy electronics, cameras or clothing online. There is that moment when trust and reputation come in to play—especially for new customers. Your brand conveys reputation and trust. Without a brand, you are reduced to a commodity, and you then need to play with the lowest bidders. Online Branding is not dead, and needs to remain a vital part of your Internet mix. Difficult does not equal impossible.

    Affiliate Marketing… Commission Junction, while impressive, is the easy way out. The best way to illustrate this is by pointing to the 700+ Affiliate Networks that are finding tremendous markets for their services and connections. Get to know CJ as well as the top 25-30 Affiliate Networks. Do your homework and allow plenty of room in your evaluation for the reputation of each network that you are evaluating. (A great way to meet and start knowing the networks is by attending a trade show such as Ad Tech or Affiliate Summit as most of the major networks attend. A face to face meeting can help you evaluate and balance a network’s online reputation with your own goals and value systems.)

    SEO… Ideally, having your very own SEO team in-house is the answer. Reality is that adding five to ten full time, highly qualified, and relatively expensive employees to your payroll can’t beat the collective experience of agencies that have dozens of full time employees that do nothing but SEO, have collective experience with dozens of clients (maybe they have worked with some of your competitors) attend workshops and sharpen their collective skills every day. Why is SEO so challenging? Google—which directs roughly 80% of all searches—is constantly changing the way their system works. Have doubts? Ask anybody who has “figured it out” and they will tell you that SEO is riddled with ever changing targets, guidelines, relevance scoring techniques, and on and on it goes. When it comes to SEO--unless you are Daddy War Bucks--hire somebody internally to interface and manage your SEO budget with your outsourced agency.

    To wrap it up, I have seen too many Internet campaigns suffocated out of existence in the relentless drive to maximize and control every last cent—insisting that every distribution channel perform at the same level as the number one channel on a buy.

    They used to say “I know that half of my [traditional] advertising budget is wasted, but I just don’t know which half.” So while maximizing your Internet marketing efforts is important, don’t forget that the Internet on a bad day is much more effective that traditional media (is becoming) on a good day.

    Do your homework, tolerate a little inefficiency in your Internet programs, and remember that while ROI is important, it is not as important as your Bottom Line.

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    Thanks for the info.

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    Online marketing is here to stay. It provides an means to present your offer to millions of potential buyers at a very minimal cost. It affords the buyer to purchase from the comfort of their home. Yes, this mode of business is here to stay.

    CPA internet marketing provides the seller/advertiser the opportunity to obtain sales and leads without hiring a sales force. The excellent quality about CPA marketing is that the seller/advertiser only pays after the desired results has been obtained. This is most advantageous to the seller.

    For more information on cpa marketing, feel free to contact our site http://cpa-affiliate-marketing..., There you will find good information about the affiliate marketing business.

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    Bravo! Get your money's worth. ROI is the name of the game. Cost per sale, cost per lead, and cost per engagement campaigns are the way to go. My experience at hydranetwork has shown me that CPA reduces wasted ad dollars.

 

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