Is Your Business Using It’s  Marketing Budget Correctly?

We have recently seen a trend in the past six months of businesses becoming more aware of the necessity of using online marketing in some form or another in their marketing mix. The trouble with this new found awareness is the inability to distinguish where to spend their money. This lack of knowledge of the different potential ways to spend their marketing or advertising budget prompted us to right this article to help educate potential clients how to achieve their marketing or advertising goals using the online medium.

What Services Provide What Returns On Investment

We always explain to new customers the differences between their choices for marketing online in the return it will provide, and how that return will be realized. Not all business are best suited to use the same marketing strategy. For instance, if you have a highly ambiguous product or service that no one knows about, SEO will not help you a whole lot. The reason being is that on one is searching for your product or service. In the land of search, keywords are everything, if no one knows the words to search for your service or product, it won’t matter how good you SEO is. You would have to try and rank for a term that you market is aware of, but will eventually be penalized for not have a site about that topic. In this case, you are better served applying your budget to awareness using Press Release, Social Media, Internet Video, & Pay Per Click.

The difference between SEO ROI and PPC ROI

This part is simple. SEO provides a higher return on investment that PPC does if done correctly, but it takes a  lot longer to realize that return than PPC. Pay Per Click marketing (pay a set fee per visitor from search engines and sites such as facebook) can be seen the day it is implemented. The down side is that once your money is spent, it’s gone. Unless you were able to capture the information of that client during their first visit, the odds of ever seeing a return out of that money is slim. Pay Per Click can be very profitable if done correctly. The secrets to profitablility are taking the time to set up a campaign properly, and understanding the results of that campaign to adjust it over time.

SEO on the other hand can take a while to start giving a return. The difference is often that the return achieved is sustainable over the long term. I often instruct clients to think about listing the costs of their SEO development on land, plant, and long term assets, or whatever they choose to use as long term assets in their finances. The reason for this is that much like making improvements to a building or land, creating internet wide quality backlinks to your site over time holds a real value. Even if your business goes belly up, a high ranking website can be sold forhundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars.

Social Media ROI

Social Media Marketing can be a great brand building tool if used correctly. The trouble is that it has become the buzz word of 2008 and 09. Everyone has heard it, only some know what it really is, and even fewer know how to use it properly. Return On Investment can be difficult to rate in quantitative monetary terms for social media since it’s best use is to connect with a target audience. It allows large and small firms to engage in relationship marketing on a much larger scale then previously possible. Just know that if you are getting into social media to sell product, you will most likely be ill received unless you are approaching your prospects properly.

Firm Misrepresentation Issues

There is no getting around it. Internet marketing is still very much the wild west of marketing and advertising. Though it has grown from it’s infancy over the past 20 years, it still is cloaked in mystery for most businesses. This allow many firms to unfairly profit of unknowledgable companies for services which are often times drastically ineffective, or even detremental to the business seeking the marketing in the first place. SEO for example is one of the most sought after, and misrepresented service in the internet marketing business. Website design firms have become aware of how profitable the fad can be and tabs about search engine optimization have popped up on website design sites, across the net. Seeing our business grow is a great thing, but there is no regulating body to help companies determine whether or not the firm they are working with actually can achieve successful results. It is not just with the small companies either. Large firms are charging upwards of $150/hour to use parlor tricks to achieve mediocre results for clients.

How To Protect Your Investment

This one is tough for most people. The only way to really ensure  that you are getting your monies worth with online marketing is to become fairly knowledgable yourself. At the very least, you should know what the effects working with a successful firm will bring. Here are just some of the things you should see from an internet marketing firm.

Establishing A Benchmark & Link Profile

They should show you a benchmark for who you are trying to compete with for keyterms in the search results if you are using them for search optimization. This should include the top competitor, the size of their site, and how many backlinks that site has, how old the site is, and several other important factors such as your page rank compared to their’s and the competition in the market. Establishing this, while not perfect, gives you a finite way to measure results on a monthly basis. Since more competitive terms will take some time to reach the top, you should also recieve your websites ranking stats for the search terms you wish to dominate.

Tracking Analytics & Site Traffic

You need to be able to read the analytics reports from your website to see if your website traffic is increasing for the search terms that you are targeting. If they are not within 2 months, it is a fairly good sign that you marketing company has no capability of doing what they said they could do. Be careful not to read to much into the stats however. Search results traffic has a tendency to jump around a lot. Often websites will see a large dip in traffic about a month after they reach the top, only to be put back to the top again.  The point is that if you firm has done their job correctly from the start, you will begin to recieve TARGETED traffic from their efforts. If you do not, what are they their for. You have far less expensive friends.