Depending on the size of your company, you may have a larger or smaller online marketing component. If you are a very large company that relies heavily on print advertisements and ads in newspapers, you will probably have a smaller budget for online advertising. But if you're smaller company, you will probably want to focus almost entirely on online marketing. You haven't established a real-life client base, and in these cases, online marketing causes far greater returns. Most companies will spend between 15 to 50% of their marketing budget on online advertising. Because of this, it's important to see why they should cleverly combine some of their efforts.
Print advertising does actually translate directly to online advertising. The main difference is that you have a lot less space to work with in Internet advertising. Normally you're paying per click, because your ads are showing up for specific searches. And in a newspaper, you're just paying a flat fee and hoping that a lot of people read the paper that month. Aside from the categories in the ad section, there's no real way to focus on your specific customers. So take whoever writes your real-life ads and get them started on writing online ads. They will have to say a lot more in a lot less space, and they will also have to include the URL of your website in a small amount of space. Be efficient and focused when doing your online advertising; but that need doesn't mean that it's something totally different from how you would do in real life.
If your a company that sends out catalogs the customers, hoping that they'll buy from you, you can directly translate that to an online e-commerce store. It's far less wasteful have people go online to your site to shop than it is to print catalogs and send them to people who may not even want them. It's a lot cheaper in the long run, because you're not having to spend the money printing and instead invest in making a nice website as a one-time fee. This is a very simple topic, but one that's easily ignored. Just because you always did it the old way with catalogs doesn't mean you can't convert your business over to an online set up. You might have some customers that refuse to change, but it's either keep them happy, or increase your costs and waste paper.
E-mail is the final thing that I'll discuss in this article right now. Many businesses do direct mailings. They send coupons, promotions, and other things to their customers directly in their USPS mailboxes. Many times these things just get thrown away, or better yet, recycled. If you are to send out unsolicited mail like this on the Internet, you can be reported by your IP address and face prosecution if one of these owners wants to sue you. I'm sure the same thing can happen in real life as well, but I think most people are used to receiving mail like this. So be smart about e-mail marketing. I wouldn't suggest doing unsolicited mailings. When your customers come in, I would obtain their e-mail addresses from them and let them know that you will send them promotions periodically. By sending an e-mail, you're giving them something that they can access from anywhere in the world as long as they've got Internet access. If you got a website, you're enabling a buyer to visit you at anytime of the day from anywhere in the world.
Finally, I will discuss video marketing. Many people pay for, or produce their own commercials for television. This is usually a smalltime operation, and production values are very low normally. Online, you can use sites like YouTube to create an advertisement for your company and reach a much larger audience much faster. Viral videos have become an incredible way to advertise. I can't give you a formula for creating instant viral video, but when it happens, it's somewhat of a phenomenon. If you could associate your company with something like that, you will have more traffic than you could handle. So if you have those skills, you might want to consider directing your efforts toward online videos rather than just focusing on television like this.
I will wrap up this discussion in my next post.
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