Beat Banner Block & Market Online Effectively

The dot-com bubble of the 90's has come and gone and doing business online is becoming essential for almost any business owner these days. While some business models don't lend themselves to e-commerce, advertising online is something that any and every business should look into. Unfortunately, all too many people still think of online advertising within the confines of traditional advertising. This is a new era and throwing up a couple of banner ads just won't cut it!

Why Banners Don't Work

These days most Internet users are virtually blind to web banners. They know where these ads are commonly placed and have been conditioned to filter them out, rendering banners near useless. According to Pernice Coyne with the Nielsen Norman Group:

"People are not looking at the typical blinding, graphical ads. They are not looking enough times to absorb a complex ad or branding message... They're looking at them if they're text. I hate to sound boring, but [it is best] if you can make sure your ad is something simple, text or a recognized logo, and it needs to be relevant to the page."

Other Internet studies have shown that users spend about 92% of the time looking at textual information (Poynter Institute, 2000). With all the studies reflecting the difficulties in advertising successfully with banners and other graphical ads, many businesses are moving towards text-based marketing. In today's ever-changing digital environment, getting your message to potential customers requires much more than buying ad spots and hoping users click. Today's Internet marketing is a new animal that provides many more opportunities for reaching your demographic.

The Wholly Trinity Of Internet Marketing

The cornerstone of the new Internet marketing is search engine optimization, or SEO. SEO is an increasingly popular area of web development that attempts to increase a web site's rankings for key search phrases in search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN. This is done by enhancing various elements of the web site to highlight targeted search phrases that garner the most traffic and result in the highest conversions. In this form of Internet marketing, you are able to reach people you know are interested in your product or service because they have already taken the initiative to search for it.

Another popular marketing avenue for marketing online is through paid search marketing or ‘pay per click' campaigns (PPC), such as Google's AdWords. Advertisers can create text-based ads that appear in the margin alongside the natural search engine results. In this system, advertisers only pay the publisher when a user clicks on the ad. This is in contrast to traditional advertising costs that are based on distribution or impressions (the number of times the ad is viewed). The benefit here is that, like search engine optimization, you are able to target potential customers that have already requested information on your product or service AND you are able to achieve instant traffic. Search engine optimization is usually the cheapest form of Internet marketing in the long run but can take time before you begin to see results from the campaign. For this reason, many online advertisers choose to supplement their SEO efforts with pay per click campaigns until they can achieve better rankings in the natural search engine rankings.

As the virtual horizon continues to grow and new ways of delivering content are created almost daily, there are a host of other options to deliver your message available. Many of these fall under the umbrella of contextual web marketing. These options are often text-based and are delivered through non-traditional means, which can be a tremendous advantage over web banners because users aren't blocking out these messages. Examples may include getting your services reviewed on a popular blog or referenced in a company newsletter. In this respect, contextual web marketing also takes advantage of established relationships, so you're not marketing to “cold” prospects and there is already an element of trust established with the message.

Make Contextual Web Marketing Work For You

There are many avenues to consider when putting together contextual marketing campaigns. The key is to determine your target audience and research your industry for potential resources. You may contact individual companies directly (which can be very time consuming) or find respected marketing companies to do the legwork for you. Regardless of whether you do your marketing in house or outsource it, make sure you track the results down to the smallest detail. Here are a few contextual marketing avenues that Internet marketers are using today with great success.

Blog Marketing: There is a blog for everything imaginable. Seek out bloggers in your industry and network with them.
Newsletter Marketing: Think of companies that have a customer/prospect base that could use your service. Offer to exchange postings in each other's newsletters. You may also increase your subscriber base!
Social Bookmarking: Have something particularly unique or special about your web site? Get your site listed with some of the popular social networking sites. If users like what you have to offer, this can spread like wildfire and jumpstart your traffic immediately.
Article Syndication: Write articles about your industry or services and syndicate them to related directories and ezines.
Newsgroups & Community Forums: Look for industry related newsgroups and online discussion forums. Create a signature link and get social. Other users may also contact you via private message.
Online Press Releases: Has anything noteworthy happened with your web site or business lately? Write a press release and submit to online newswires.

Gradually more and more businesses are waking up to the fact that Internet marketing is where they need to be focusing their attention. Annual revenue for marketing online continues to soar as user access to high-speed Internet climbs more people turn to search engines for shopping, travel, and daily activities. Marketing online can be extremely effective when businesses implement solid contextual based marketing targeted to the right audience. Test out the listed marketing methods and you'll be sure to make your business an online success.