Online Advertising - Explode Your Traffic and Grow Your Business Exponentially

There is no doubt that many manufacturers in most industries have experienced tough times over the last couple of years. Originally by rapid increases in commodity driven pricing and changes in consumer buying behaviour, then by the international economic crisis. Unfortunately the impact has resulted in those businesses that have survived, to watch their profit line very closely.

So how does one continue to advertise their business during these difficult times with a tight marketing budget? Well this can be achieved by leveraging the power of search engine marketing (SEM). Adding online advertising channels to your marketing mix can help you:

• Keep traffic coming through your doors

• Measure your marketing dollar effectively

While conventional advertising is money intensive, complicated to assess in terms of return on investment and requires a substantial lead time; search engine marketing can be relatively affordable and can be measured and optimized for effectiveness. Once you've learned the principles, online marketing is simple enough to be managed yourself or it can be outsourced to agencies or consultants.

Below are a couple of areas of online advertising that you can add to your marketing plan:

* Paid search text ads, also recognized as pay per click (PPC) or Adwords
* Paid display adverts where you pay per click. Sometimes known as image ads or banners
* Social Media
* Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), involves driving web traffic from the organic search results on Google and other search engines

1. Paid Search

Paid search ads are very powerful in that they position your ad in front of your searchers when they are in the mindset of purchasing. The most awesome part is this. Each time your ad is viewed you expand your mind share with that viewer and you only pay for your ad when it gets clicked. Paid search ads are highly targeted and are particularly optimize-able to meet your business goals.

Display Ads

Also a form of Paid Search advertising, display ads can be as affordable or costly as your resources allow. For instance, Google allows you to upload some of your existing creative media and distributes your display ads across their network. You can target your ads to geographic locations and to publishers that are relevant to your community or audience. Google AdWords uses an auction based payment system and also offers affordable CPM’s (cost per 1000 impressions).

Social Media

One of the newcomers to the online marketing space is Social Media advertising. Social Media advertising leverages the natural conversation happening between people on sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, blogs and other online communities to extend your brand and share your dealerships offerings. Your customers are already using Social Media to share with each other their experiences around your service, your business and your competitors. By using Social Media marketing you are able to tap into these conversations and build a feedback loop with your customers. The search engines are starting to pay a lot more attention to the Social Media space. In the near future if not already, the content and context of social media traffic will influence Google and other search engines in determining relevancy and in turn search results. This will increase as social media becomes even more widely used.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Yes, adding online advertising to your marketing mix has very low barriers to entry, will allow you to get the most value from your ad dollars, while monitoring and growing your reputation within your base. Now consider Search Engine Optimisation as a strategy. As a business you are easily able to obtain and build SEO skills via readily available resources. You may be able to identify a particular staff member who could be up skilled to take on this responsibility, you could contract in some or all of the skills, or you could decide to learn the skills yourself.

Consider this SEO reality:

* SEO (if done correctly) can yield around 4 times the amount of traffic than paid search advertising!
* Once implemented SEO incurs far less cost to maintain the results than paid advertising does.
* SEO derived traffic is far more targeted and likely to convert.

Search engine marketing (SEM) or online advertising is a powerful and rewarding medium. As the search engines and social networks continue to evolve into even more pivotal parts of the whole internet, marketing on this platform will become more critical, and if you can master it, particularly with techniques such as SEO you will be well positioned to reap the rewards.