5 – Online Promotion Plan There are tons of online promotion tactics that you can use to market your products. However, you will not be able to use all of them. The online marketing tools that you should include in your promotion plan will be based upon your goals, your audience’s online habits and preferences, as well as your company’s financial and time constraints. The most commonly used tools are: Organic SEO. Organic SEO is used to impact your website’s position within the search engine results for relevant keywords. Pros: This strategy drives targeted traffic to your site and has long-term benefits that often outlive your efforts. Surfers place more trust in the natural results than they do in paid results. Cons: It takes time for the benefits of organic SEO to materialize. It can be extremely expensive. Paid Search Engine Marketing or SEM. SEM is used to drive targeted potential buyers to your site via sponsored search engine results-think “Google AdWords”. Pros: This strategy can provide near immediate results. It also allows advertisers highly detailed analytics. Performance based pay structure-you pay only for clicks. Cons: Many a firm has lost their shirt doing PPC marketing. Campaigns can get expensive really quick and if you aren’t conducting testing you could easily get in over your head. Affiliate Marketing. Affiliate marketing is where you pay affiliates a commission on the sales that they help to generate for you online. Pros: Highly cost effective way to bring targeted buyers to your site. In addition to bringing you sales affiliates also give you back-links to your site. Cons: Your sales are dependent upon the strength of your affiliates. Although relative to SEO and PPC overall affiliate marketing costs are low the set up costs can be expensive. Online PR. Online PR speaks to the methods that you use to influence the perception of your online audience to your product(s) or brand. This includes social media as well as the management of your online newsroom and press releases. Pros: Relatively inexpensive to utilize. Since online pr often results in people sharing information with each other about your products, this tool is very similar to a traditional referral-you stand to get warm leads. Cons: You have little control of your message as much of online pr as the consumer primarily controls or drives social media. You also have less control over the type of traffic that your website will receive from your online pr efforts-meaning you could get a high percentage of window shoppers from this type of marketing. Email Marketing. Email marketing is a form of marketing where the marketer uses emails as the communication medium to reach the consumer-directly. Pros: This can be used to complement PPC marketing and it can greatly enhance the experience of your current customers. Relative to the other tools email marketing offers a very high ROI. Cons: You can easily alienate customers if you aren’t careful. If you break the CAN-SPAM Act you could be fined up to 16,000 USD for a single violation. Blogging. You can use a business blog to communicate with your audience while building your web presence. Pros: Very affordable. Easy way to establish your brand online. Cons: Can be highly time consuming. May take a long time to generate sales of your products. Again, you may find that some of these online promotional strategies are more practical for your firm than others. The key is that you will want to have a plan that details which tools you will use to market your products so that your company will not be flying blind.
Posted on: Tue, 18 Jun 2013 06:41:51 +0000
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