Online Marketing

Imagine a world where you open a business and the next day you have people lined up waiting for you to sell them something. Well, no imagination needed, welcome to the world of online paid advertising.

Online paid advertising is a way of getting instant visitors to your website. While there are several ways of accomplishing an online paid marketing campaign, the most popular ways are Pay-per-Click (PPC) or Pay-per-Impression (PPM, where the M stands for “Mille” or thousand. Why not just called PPI? Good question, let us know when you find the answer).

PPC and PPM work similarly to each other. Both ways involve putting advertisements (ads) in different websites with messages that would entice potential customers to click on your ad in order to buy whatever is that your selling, whether a product or a service.

The main difference is that as the name implies, PPC means you will pay each time a person clicks on one of your ads, while PPM, you will pay a fix amount for a particular ad to be displayed a thousand times.

What works Best, PPC or PPM?

It depends. One thing to consider is that there’s a lot of trial-and-error when it comes to online advertising because it is very difficult to get in the head of consumers and understand what makes them click an ad, what makes them buy, etc.

Just like medical doctors would first understand your symptoms, prescribe a treatment, and then see if treatment was effective prior to trying a different treatment, we try to understand the business and the consumers for each particular line of business and then figure out what/when/where to advertise and see if it works. If it doesn’t work, then we try something else until we succeed. Sometimes PPC may work very well and sometimes it’s the opposite. An important thing to note is that the cost of each ad changes all the time because it is based on an auction system.

This can make things really uncomfortable for business owners that are new to the internet because there’s obviously a cost involved to placing the ads and not knowing how much money in return you’ll get, if any at all, can be stressful. But, being a business owner per se is a risky business because you never know whether you’ll have a costumer tomorrow, so whether you’re advertising online or by handing out business cards, flyers, and mailers, the truth is that you’ll never know if the marketing campaign works until you try it.

That being said, online marketing should be your #1 choice because online you get something that you don’t get anywhere else: Lots of Data.

Data is important because it lets you analyze what are people clicking and figure out why they’re clicking your ads. Maybe some ads have better messages than other ads and people are responding with higher amounts of clicks; the same can be true for the different types of images used. Many times you can also get data on what city/state/country your visitors are coming from, the day, and the time. You can also know what age group and sex is your typical website visitor. All that data allows us to fine tune your online marketing campaign.

Where can I place my advertisements?

Virtually anywhere, but like anything else in life, it depends on how much you’re willing to invest. By far, the most popular place to place ads is Google through their platform called Google Adwords. The beauty about advertising on Google is that you can use text ads on every possibly keyword imaginable and that ad will be displayed alongside the normal search results when someone Googles a specific word. This takes out a lot of guesswork and most importantly ensures that only those people interested in your business are going to be seeing those ads.

If you sell Golf Balls and only do so in the USA, you wouldn’t want someone from England who googled the term “Football” to be shown your ad, or even worse, click on your ad, which means you’ll end up paying for that ad fee and will definitely not be selling anything to that person.

How many visitors can I get and how quickly?

The sky is the limit, or let’s call it your wallet. If you want 100,000 visitors to go to your website tomorrow, you’ll get 100,000 visitors tomorrow. It’s that fast, at least in theory.

The most time consuming part of online advertising is doing the necessary research to understand what keywords to advertise, understanding the business, writing the ads (several) and link them to different pages within your website. Creating content for each of the services or products you’re trying to advertise is in itself very time consuming but very much necessary. You can’t just direct people to your home page because people’s attention span on the internet is very short.

For example, say your store sells all sorts of shoes: running, basketball, soccer, etc. Say someone googles “Tiger Wood Golf Shoes for sale” and they are directed to your homepage which contains no mention of Tiger Wood Golf shoes, chances are that visitor within seconds is going to leave your website and look somewhere else. You can’t make the visitors of your website work. If they can’t find what they were looking for within a few seconds then you lost that sale and the money for the advertisement. A better approach would have been, for instance, to link that ad directly to the page that sells tiger woods shoes and create a little engaging description of the shoes and why they are awesome along with a big sign that says you’re offering a small discount only available if you purchase right now.

So there’s certainly a lot of preparation but once you’re ready and press the activate button, you’ll start getting visitors and hopefully sales right away.

Contact us now and gain a huge amount of potential customers.