Most business marketers are finding that with more than 24 million online users in the United States alone, businesses need to tap into a different avenue of advertising if they want to improve their website traffic and generate more profits. While the typical way that companies market their products is through traditional methods like emails, e-commerce and banners, you need to use the internet to find the most effective methods to boost their web site profits, generate more leads and bring in more sales. What are some of the best ways you can use to generate an additional income, make more profits, and build your own brand?
First off, if you are going to invest in your business’ advertising, you need to make sure that your ads are geared towards the right demographic. Sure, your product may be great, but if your demographics are geared towards an older crowd, what type of ad are you going to use to make them want to buy your product? Or, are you going to be one of those tech companies who spend thousands of dollars every single month launching their product globally with colorful ad campaigns that build brand recognition?
It is your advertising budget, so if you are going to use a certain pool of spending dollars, you need to carefully audit your ads and determine which ones are most effective in generating leads and sales for you. If you aren’t targeting the right type of customers, then chances are your ad won’t be a part of their minds when they are looking for a product similar to yours.
Prior to creating any advertisements though, you need to have some sort of strategy in place for how you will market your business. The most common methods for online advertising are banner ads, email campaigns and pay-per-click insertions.
Banner Ads
Banner ads are one of the most generic types of media advertising and they have been around for years. But with the invention of graphic banner ads, they have lost lots of their effectiveness. But the thing about banner ads is that they aren’t as expensive as other types of media advertising…therefore, some business owners choose to include banner ads on their web sites.
When it comes to banner ads, you need to find a good standardized platform for advertising with. There are lots of software platforms that can help you create effective, well written banners, but you want to also get the services of professional designers so that you can duplicate their skills and expertise. Additionally, you want to choose the advertising method that is best for your business. Is it only text and image ads or do you also need to have video results or a combination of both? What type of design are you going to use? All of these design decisions will help you decide if banner ads are the right solution for your business.
Email Campaigns
When was the last time you sent an email to a company that you subscribed to for? Chances are you have deleted some, or maybe you have just signed up for the service. Most of the time, when you receive a promotional email for something that you really want to buy, you spend your time exchanging information (or deleting the email) for the email address.
Email marketing is still very effective though, and business owners can target their end of the market by having only those people subscribing to their email list. These people are regularly looking for information and keeping in touch with friends about new trends in their field of interest. You can use this database to send useful information to their on a regular basis (even free information) about your product and service.
Pay-Per-Click Insertions
Pay-per-click or PPC advertisements are also used quite often. They include ads that appear as sponsored links on search engine results pages, web sites, in forums, and media sites. They also appear on sites that have signed up with them and can contribute content to the entire network. This is usually a huge benefit for smaller businesses since each time a potential customer clicks on the link that appears on the search engine results page, it costs the PPC company a fee.
Now these ads can get quite expensive if you are bidding on popular key phrases or if you are running ads on sites that have multiple advertisers. Make sure that you play with the system and create a PPC plan that’s rich in analytics at the very least. There are marketers that implement three-second ad campaigns for such things as ensign equipment, meaning that their ad will start running even before the web page is created, so analytics are essential. There are also a number of social media sites, like Facebook and Twitter, that can be used to generate traffic when you launch a PPC campaign.