Online marketing and sales is distinct from any other form of marketing because of one very important fact: you can track online conversions. Let me explain with a hypothetical situation: let’s say you sell comic books (you have your own store and e-commerce website) and you ran an ad with the Orange County Business Journal because they’re offering you a great deal in light of these dire economic times.
Say a couple people walked into your brick and mortar store, bought a couple comics as a result of the ad; they could’ve been customers that would’ve come in regardless for all you know. There’s no way for you to figure out how effective that ad’s performance was, whereas with online ads and particularly pay per click in Google AdWords, all the metrics are handed to you on a silver platter.
Even if you’re doing banner ads on a small niche blog that isn’t part of a major ad network, but happens to talk about your line of work making it appealing to advertise with (relevance), you can track the number of visitors and conversions. If you know how much money you need to spend to get a sale with that blog, then it’s easy to figure out how much to you should be paying per click.
I do make it sound easy, although there’s a lot that goes into running an online marketing campaign so I’m not saying it’s easy as pie. What I’m saying is, why spend money on something that maybe works when you can pour money into something that you know will reward you on your investment? I’ll give you another example, one that most of us small businesses can’t relate with, but can see the value in.
Let’s say you’re a mega multinational corporation blasting a 30 second ad on television during the Super Bowl and the cost is: a whopping 3 million dollars. Do these television ads work? Yes. They convert like there’s no tomorrow, otherwise companies wouldn’t have continued to pay for them over the decades. Now the 3 million dollar question: what’s your return on investment for that ad?
It’s so hard to figure out, you don’t really know. You need a team of ninjas just to figure it out, and by the time they figure it out, you already spent 3 million on top of what you pay your team. What if you lost money on the ad? While it wouldn’t be a complete loss, there’s a lot of money to lose, and this whole time, I’ve been assuming that the ads being used are good ones. What if your ads are garbage?
Sure when you’ve got money to throw, you hire companies to figure out what your demographic wants to see, do all sorts of studies and samples of the population to engineer your ad for performance. That’s great, but don’t you want to see what your ad can do in real time before you set it loose with tons of money to burn? I’m not talking about polls and surveys; real performance with real people.
With online marketing, you can do that. You can set a budget of maybe a hundred dollar a day, a week, a month, whatever you want. You can split test your ads, basically showing your traffic one of two different ads, and seeing which one works better than the other. You then take the best ad, make a variation, and then test again. You keep testing until you get the highest conversion rate possible.
All the while you’re still making money on conversions, and most importantly, you’re not investing a whole lot of money before you know what you’re getting in return while you evolve the potency of your ads. When you’re done, you’ll have a killer ad that you’ve tested in a trial by fire, which you can also use in your offline campaigns, and get this: you made money throughout the whole process.
Honestly, that’s not a bad deal and it’s so powerful that AdWords (Google’s main source of revenue) generated 21 billion dollars in 2008. I haven’t even talked about why it’s called site “targeted” advertising and not just advertising, the bread and butter of the business. If you feel you’re ready to dabble with some online marketing or refine your existing campaigns, contact me and we’ll get started.
