Advantages of the Internet

  Goal

Reach certain segments of the market or the targeted agents of your product via the ad on the internet.

Like anything in life, marketing online requires that we first create a clear vision of what we want our outcome to be.
If we have no vision of what the finish line looks like, how can we possibly know if we’ve reached it and met our goals?

We begin by looking at our business. Many advertisers fail to do this and start with goals like “We want to get more visitors” or “We just need traffic”. That’s false. If you’re an ecommerce site that sells a product and I drive 100,000 people a month to your site and none of them buy, I’ve met your stated goal of “more traffic”, but it didn’t do your business any good in terms of sales - which was your true goal.

Any marketing goal should be:

§  Measurable

§  Specific

§  Realistic

Here are some realistic goals that can be measured, meaning that at the end of the campaign/quarter/year we’ll know definitively whether we did or did not reach them:

§  “We want to generate 500 leads per month”

§  “We want to generate leads at a Cost Per Lead not to exceed $25 per lead”

§  “We want to drive 10,000 downloads of our company’s white paper in the next 90 days”

§  “We want to drive sales at a Cost Per Sale not to exceed $15″

§  “We want to generate 1 million member signups this year”

§  “We want to generate $5 million in ecommerce sales through our web site”

§  “We want to generate 1,000 qualified telephone leads per month for our national sales force”

Each of these is an acceptable place to start. Note that they’re all fairly quantifiable. We can track phone calls generated from a web campaign. But we still have a considerable number of unknowns. For example, how much traffic (visitors) will it take to convert into 1,000 qualified phone leads per month?

The answer is that we can make some very general assumptions on paper, but we really will have no idea until we start driving traffic to the site - qualified traffic. Targeted traffic. That’s why it’s critical to test-test-test.

Specific

A specific goal leaves few questions unanswered other than “How will we do it?”.

Branding/Awareness Goals

Perhaps your company doesn’t sell product through your site. Maybe you simply want to increase brand awareness within your customer segment. Your goals are a bit more difficult to measure than someone with a direct marketing goal, but they still need to be specific, measurable and realistic.

Specific: “We want to increase aided and unaided brand awareness in our market segment by two percentage points by end of year”

Measurable: Where is your aided/unaided awareness now? How is it being measured? How will you structure pre and post-campaign studies to show brand lift?

Realistic: How big is your market segment? How many people must you reach in order to show a lift of two percentage points? Is this a realistic goal given what your company has available and allocated to marketing efforts?

If not, perhaps a reality check is in order.

Tracking

A great  possibility presented to the agent to track the effects of the campaign and its results accurately in contrast with other media.

The beauty behind online advertising is the amount of data that you can acquire from your campaign. When you establish an online marketing campaign, the vendors will provide a report that tells you from their perspective, the success of your campaign. These reports are presented by the vendor, but many marketers miss the mark by analyzing only these results. It is important to go one step further to determine what type of action the user took on your actual Web site. Did they jump off your site once they clicked on your ad? Did they navigate, purchase or submit a form? Using third-party software such as Urchin, Web Trends or WebSideStory can help you determine these results.

A successful campaign should be evaluated by looking at the vendor reports, evaluating the actions visitors took on your Web site and lastly, what type of return you received as a result of the campaign. Look closely at all of the numbers -- particularly the costs associated with driving the traffic and each cost per sale. With these metrics, you will begin to understand the contribution your online advertising campaign makes to your overall marketing strategy. 

Material Value

Online advertising is a cost-efficient way to relay your message to potential customers, allowing you to reach more of your audience and providing thoughtful and meaningful data on your marketing spend. Unlike the majority of marketing programs that are difficult to track, online advertising provides direct insight into the return on investment of your marketing campaigns and helps to build a larger customer base and revenue.

There is no media in the world like the Internet. The Internet is always on. The window to reach consumers is ALWAYS OPEN. It’s like a store that never closes. It’s an ad that never goes away. 

Today’s ad spending has shifted from the long standby, Newspapers and Magazines, to the cheaper and more effective Internet.  This is just the beginning.

Newspaper and Magazine advertising is struggling to stay alive. Why?

1.      It’s so expensive.  A full page color ad in a Newspaper can cost $30,000 for one single day. For $30,000, you could advertise 11 communities for a full year on a website . $30,000 for one day or $30,000 for 365 days. To any bean counter, the answer is clear. 

2. The window to reach consumers is tiny. Sure, Newspapers will tout a distribution of hundreds of thousands or millions, but how many people are looking on that one particular day you spent $30,000 for your ad?  Exactly.

3.  Tracking print effectiveness is near impossible.  Website log files can record whether consumers just type in your website address or if they click from another website to yours.  This feature can more accurately track the return you are getting from advertising on other websites.

4. Poor Return On Investment (ROI).  When Newspapers and Magazines were the only real options for consumers to find new homes, they were effective. Expensive but still effective.  The Internet has changed all that.  It’s cheaper. People spend more time on the Internet than read Newspapers and Magazines combined.

Newspapers and Magazines will always have a place in advertising, but the shift we are seeing is only the tip of the iceberg.  We have only just begun to see the transfer of power.