Online Advertising Problems and Solutions

Online advertising is easily revered as one of the best, most cost effective ways of growing your business.

From Wall Street Journal, July 30, 2008:

“Online ads are far less expensive than print ads.”
- "Newspapers Think Locally For Online Ads"

Web advertising allows you to make a better sales presentation to people who may not want to be sold to by other means.

By online advertising you are allowing the customer to feel less intimidated. People don’t like to “be sold,” so it’s important that you utilize effective online advertising to do the selling for you. If you are already website advertising, it’s important to get the right kind of traffic. What’s the point of having a fantastic, automated, selling machine if no one sees it?

When it comes to finding an effective means of online advertising, there are several major points to discuss. The web is a very big place and continuing to grow.

Here are some common problems with online advertising:

#1. It can be a lot of work. As a business owner there are many other day to day issues to be deal with, and trying to learn advertising on the internet is not in your best interest.

#2. While advertising costs can be more effective when choosing online media, if you buy ad space on a particular Media’s website, you might not be targeting your market well enough and you can easily blow through your budget with CPM (cost per thousand) on a highly trafficked website.

#3. A visitor who comes to a page your business is online advertising with may not be able to find that page again because either they were simply browsing (which most people using the internet do the first time they are looking for a service or product to comparison shop or to find that initial information to see if they should take a step further) OR that site’s navigation is so muddled and confusing to the visitor (especially to the senior, baby boomer or retirement market). This market cannot be ignored, please see marketing to seniors to see what you’re missing!

#4. PPC (or Pay Per Click) is a form of web advertising that is simply not effective for most keywords your business would be associated with.

Proven marketing tests conducted have tracked the eye movement and clicking habits of visitors when it comes to these ads. For products like “digital camera” a browser might be looking to actually buy a camera, knowing that the online ads on the top and far right column are businesses selling cameras.

But more than likely visitors are browsing for information until they type in a specific terms like “buy canon sureshot 3500.”

You can lose money by having someone click your PPC online ad to just get information.

So if you are bidding on terms, which is really a bidding war that only internet marketers should be involved in (because there are lots of tricks to keeping costs down and having success but it’s ever changing), you might lose your shirt.

These proven marketing tests show that the overwhelming majority of users go straight to the natural search (which means they go straight to the listings based on where Google or other search engines rank a page on a website that show relevance to the term being types in). They do this for services AND products.

If you are a medium to small sized business, PPC may be cheaper, but if you’re selling a service to those specific key terms you want to bid on, you may get little traffic OR you may get very good traffic. So you can’t afford not to be at the top of the natural search for those specific key terms, like “Green Bay Long Term Care Insurance.”

These visitors are not only perfectly targeted, but they are also seeking information for that service; and people seeking information don’t click on PPC ads. They want Google to tell them where to go.

So right now ask yourself this: where are you with your online advertising endeavors? Web advertising is critical to any business.

Bottom Line: Online Advertising is too effective NOT to be utilizing correctly.

The solution to these problems is simple. You must have a web marketing program that works for you. NRN Marketing has developed a program that works for you around the clock.

From Business Week August/September 2008:

Ames Walker has sold compression hosiery online for ten years. Their market is the 50+ plus market. What Paul is saying is that your ad needs to be found under the search terms people use.

There are two targets for compression hosiery in this case. There will be the individual who is looking to buy for themselves and then there is caregiver of that person who is buying for them.

So in this case, being found through search is highly important and also advertising where caregivers congregate online is also idealistic.

The National Retirement Network gives you both of those benefits. It reaches search terms that are determinetal to "Silver Industries" but also provides your business with a large audience who may not of known your product or service exsisted. The NRN also provides you ONE SIMPLE SOLUTION to the three ways of target marketing.

Discover more about the importance of target marketing here.