Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising can do more than simply create traffic for your website. If creatively executed, you can put the search engines to work for you and create a brand people can identify.

When it comes to PPC advertising solutions, Google AdWords is pretty much king. But since Google’s king of search engines, that’s really no surprise. Customers search Google more than any other search engine.

A recent study comparing AdWords to Yahoo Search Marketing noted that it’s often 50 percent cheaper to bid on keywords with AdWords. So not only is Adwords based on the most used search engine, but it also tends to be cheaper. That doesn’t mean you should only consider using AdWords. Using both Search Marketing and AdWords can be a good strategy. But if you’re operating on a small marketing budget, AdWords could help save some money.

PPC is designed to create traffic, but of course, like any advertising strategy it does have limitations. PPC can sometimes fail to bring business to companies competing with larger corporations. In other instances, you’ll fail to reach a receptive audience. Many searchers choose not to click on the paid search results, believing the organic results are going to be more relevant. And sometimes, you just can’t compete with the main keywords of your niche because the cost per click will simply be too expensive.

However, PPC advertising has many advantages over other internet advertising programs. Here are some key advantages to using PPC.

Shoestring Budget
It is possible to start a PPC campaign with a just a few bucks. With an endless supply of keywords and keyword phrases, you can generally build a localized or very niche, long-tail keyword campaign on a small budget. You might get fewer impressions, but when you do win the click you have a better chance of actually being what the search is looking for. Of course, if you’re looking to go after more generalized or popular keywords just as “books for sale” or “movie sales,” to compete you’ll need a much bigger budget.

Branding
If you want to build a brand, you need to market not only your services or products, but also your company. PPC is one of the best tools for getting your company name noticed. With PPC, your company name and ad will display at the top of the search engine when potential buyers search your keywords. Even if buyers don’t click on your ad, they are still seeing it, giving you free exposure.

Page Domination
Like I stated earlier, a lot of people choose not to click on the sponsored search results because they believe the organic to be more relevant. Well the opposite is true for another subset of searchers. Therefore, one of the best strategies for PPC advertising is to use it in conjunction with search engine optimization. This can give your website the potential to show up in the sponsored and organic search results, allowing you to dominate the search results and show that you are the true expert in your industry.

You may have never considered it, but in a way Pay-Per-Click and branding actually do go hand in hand. But with the amount of exposure search engines offer, it’s really quite simple. Your buyers are using them to find you, why not make it easier. A well executed PPC campaign can get you brand exposure, help you build your brand identity, establish you as an expert in your field and direct traffic to your website.

Social marketing has made millions for those who adapted early, but it’s not too late to jump on board and benefit from the marketing potential social media have to offer. You may be wondering why social marketing is so powerful. Well, mostly because you’re able to reach prospects in new and creative ways on their terms, giving them a sort of home field advantage, if you will.

Buyers have fun on Facebook; they enjoy networking on LinkedIn. It’s their choice to include you, to follow your twitter posts, to like your Facebook page, to invite you to send them marketing messages. That alone provides a receptive audience no other media can offer.

So, how do you harness the marketing potential of social media. The most important factor when it comes to social marketing is your audience. If they’re not on Facebook, social marketing probably isn’t going to work for you. So assuming your target audience is on Facebook, or at least some segment of it, you should consider the following reasons for advertising to prospects through social media.

Profit
The main goal of most marketing efforts is to produce capital, and social marketing is no different. Yes, it can be fun, but the bottom line is that for businesses social marketing can be a boon.  Social marketing allows you to create interest, showcase your benefits, educate buyers, and can even close the sale. There are a variety of ways to efficiently sell on social media sites. Using Facebook apps, links on twitter, coupons as status updates, etc, you can close the deal without buyers ever even reaching your main website or picking up the phone.

No More Cold Calls
With a new client base found socially, you can take the surprise out of the message. It can also save a lot of time. Calling 10,000 people can take weeks even with a decent sized staff, while posting 5 messages on Facebook every day can take a matter of hours and be read by even larger numbers. This is not to say cold calling is obsolete; the numbers say otherwise. The real point is you can save on man-hours and reach a receptive audience by using social marketing.

Go Viral
Messages go viral on the social web every single minute. The big example used in marketing circles today is Blendtec blender, which, with a crazy-low budget, used YouTube and social buzz to boost the company bottom line incredibly with its Will It Blend? campaign. Blendtec simply showed how its blender could cut through anything, from cell phones to marbles. It went viral on the social web, turned a small budget into tens of thousands of blenders sold, and now it’s history.

How Cheap is This Approach?
That depends on what’s more valuable to you, time or money. Social marketing is very cost effective in terms of ROI. It can cost nothing to set up a Facebook business page or a twitter account. But the one thing it does take is time. It takes time and a lot of effort to build a quality following. Sure, you can attract a thousand fans with a free give-away or buy a cheap program to build your follows, but is that going to help you build a receptive following full of real prospects? For social marketing to pay off, you need to be willing to invest a great deal or time, or hire a company to manage your social profiles for you.

Engaging New Clients
Many companies use professional social marketing campaigns to find new clients on a daily basis. It’s a good investment for creating interest from all ranges of prospects. When combined with other forms of online and offline advertising, social marketing can be a valuable venue for marketing to new prospects. Create content, interest and even more buyers with social marketing.

Direct marketing has been around for a long time and you might think that there are newer, better ways to invest your advertising budget. But really, direct marketing is a lot like the wheel; you will never run out of uses for it. As long as there are buyers and sellers, there will likely be direct marketing.

But why use direct marketing in the first place? How will it benefit your business? When pitching prospects your best sales pitch, consider the following reasons for going right to their mailbox (if not inbox).
Direct marketing is about selling to individuals. Each buyer, each customer, each prospect has different wants and needs. Selling on a personalized level has worked for centuries in marketing. Instead of spamming a million buyers with your sales pitch, send a personalized message to real prospects who you know have some interest in your gadget. By focusing on the individual buyer, you can save time and money by sending out less letters and emails. The point here is that pitching directly to each customer based on his or her own interests is the most effective.

Building Relationships
The most valuable customer is the repeat customer. The buyer who comes back time and time again, not only to buy more of the same product but to buy upgrades, other products and tells their friends and family about your products. Direct marketing is one of the best ways to build relationships with your customers and turn them into repeat customers. If they already made a purchase from you, you know valuable information about that customer. Use it to sell them more.

Testing The Market
Perhaps the best application of direct marketing is testing. Because email campaigns are relatively inexpensive to produce and distribute and because of the extremely quick response time, they make for excellent ways to test the effectiveness of an ad campaign. Change the layout, the wording, the compelling offer. Test different markets, different buyers, different products. When you get the response you were hoping for with the email campaign, expand into more markets or other media. The possibilities are endlessly useful.

The consumer is always evolving and constantly changing the way they shop and respond to advertising. But one thing remains the same, they still like to be reached on an individual level, whether that’s with a personalized email or just a television ad that speaks to their own experiences.

Direct mail is an effective way to reach buyers on an individual level. And with a good mailing list, sellers can pitch to prospects who have an immediate interest in buying. Whatever your goal for marketing, pitching prospects directly can lead to a boost in sales and brand awareness.

Mastering the pitch is the subject of many books, blogs, and only a few billion emails. Pitches are all around us, we’ve just become accustomed to them. It used to be you’d have sales pros knocking on your front door with a suitcase full of vacuum accessories and catalogs, calls on the phone at inconvenient times, and pitches coming from direct mail ads. These are all still here to some extent, but something is becoming obvious: web marketing is the most effective marketing firm. Big words. Why?

Why use the web for pitches?
Web marketing has many clear advantages, but let’s keep it simple for now: you save time and money when marketing online, reaching more prospects than ever before. How many spam emails do you get every day? How much junk mail in your real mail box? If it’s about even or slanted to one side, that’s completely different than it was not so long ago.

Now, not all pitches are spam. You can use the web to reach buyers much faster, much easier, and much more effectively. This is because you have infinite options, infinite leads, infinite potential for pitching prospects.

Why emails?
Well, we went over junk mail, but if these marketers are making money, why not you too? Not junk mail but direct, reputable emails to buyers. Pitching buyers via email is like sending out hundreds if not thousands of emails in a fraction of the time for a fraction of the cost. Pitches via email are not always as effective as content marketing, such as Facebook marketing, but emails are a perfect way to introduce yourself personally to a prospect.

Why social?
A happy buyer follows your company Facebook page, watches for sales, and spends hundreds of dollars on your items every year. This same buyer recommends your basic, easy-to-build Facebook page to 10 friends. Do we have to continue?

How fast?
Pitching online is instantaneous, though how soon your prospects read your email, copy page, blog post, or social message varies. Still, you can reach many of your prospects in a matter of seconds. This is the prime mover in terms of web marketing; you can sell far more. Take Amazon, where you get a daily email about “Deals of the Day” and “Gold Box Specials” if you are a steady buyer. How could you do this with letters or phone calls?

How many pitches?
Pitching prospects online need not be in volume. You have options when it comes to how often you post on Facebook, or how many emails you send, or how many prospects you want to contact every day. This changes for each company. However, a daily message at a minimum is smart. Flooding customers obviously is spamming, but not contacting them at all is prime for being forgotten.

Now you know why you should pitch online. Follow this blog more for some useful pitching posts.

Ideas are the bread and butter of the marketing business, if you will ignore the cliché. Every commercial, every direct mail letter, every single email, almost every word of any marketing piece came from an idea. Ideas are important. They are the fun part of the process, and all too often undervalued. Clearly, your ideas for marketing your business have value. How you get marketers to listen and how you make your ideas reality, is all up to you.

Getting Ideas
Really, ideas just happen. You don’t necessarily get them in the shower or right when you’re about to fall sleep, but sometimes the best ideas come when you least expect them. That’s not to say that brainstorming is a waste of time. I find it’s still helpful and often get the best marketing ideas a few hours after a brainstorming session. That is after I’ve already brainstormed all the bad ones.

The important thing about generating ideas isn’t when or how you come up with them, it’s remembering them. The best way to do this, is to right them down. And I recommend writing all of them down, not just the ones you like because you may come back to them later, change you mind about which ones you like or find a way to improve a really bad one and turn it into a golden idea.

Sharing Ideas
In marketing, ideas are not a dime a dozen. Ideas are money. Of course, there is no guarantee that your idea is great, but quite even horrible ideas like a fussy grocery store manager running around squeezing toilet paper will generate results. So when you’re ready, share your ideas. Two heads truly are better than one and if you share an okay idea with someone, they might be able to take that idea, expand upon it and turn it into your next big marketing campaign.

If you’re not ready to take your ideas to your marketing agency, start by sharing with someone you’re comfortable with. The only way to find out if your marketing idea is any good is to share it with others. Someone thought of DOS, someone thought of Windows and people with a bit less in the bank thought up Google and YouTube. Quite often, these ideas came through trial and error. It’s important to bounce your ideas off others and for them to do the same, because it fosters a good marketing strategy.

Turning Ideas into Reality
An idea will always be just that unless you have the right tools to turn it into something more.

Working with a marketing or advertising team can help generate solid marketing ideas, but more than that, they can execute an entire advertising or marketing campaign based on that idea. They can turn a simply idea of a store manager squeezing toilet paper into the longest running tv commercial in history with over 500 ads.

Marketing isn’t just about having the best idea; you also need to be able to turn those ideas into something. And whether that ends up being 30-second spot that airs only once or a new slogan that will carry your brand for over 2 and a half decades, you’ll never know if you don’t first come up with the idea.

In terms of newspaper readers versus online readers, it is no longer a question of why online marketing has become a staple and print media is losing ground. The real question is why online marketing is working so well. Consider the advantages it has over print media in terms of time, costs, and effect. Let’s go into more detail of why online marketing is gaining popularity.

Buyers Look Online
Buyers are changing. While direct mail marketing isn’t one for the history books yet, the new aspects of marketing are web usage. Buyers are smarter with their money; they don’t just immediately spend it on the first ad they see. They research products, competitors and prices, often online, making direct marketing far more difficult. This is not to say you can no longer use direct marketing, but online marketing may have more of an immediate impact.

Media Usage Down, Web Usage Up
In the book “Get Content, Get Customers,” it’s noted that while newspaper sales are going down, PC usage is going up. Look at the huge growth in Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn users, compare it to how major newspapers are losing ground and cutting budgets, and you’ll see why online marketing is superior. Again, this is not to say traditional media marketing and coverage has no place, but in the last 40 years, newspapers readers have almost been halved in certain age groups, while internet usage has gone from nothing to billions.

Immediate Impact of Online Marketing
Online marketing can be easier to track, easier to implement, and easier to see the results. This is because of advancing digital technologies for tracking search engine rates, site traffic, and click throughs. For example, with Google Analytics, you can get a free reporting tool showing visitor trends, traffic sources, page visits and even what keywords people are using to find your site. Try getting the same kind of information and reporting from your print marketing.

Easier to Build Prospect and Customer Base
With email marketing, blog RSS feeds, social media accounts, and other useful content technologies, building up a base of leads, prospects, and customers has become much more streamlined.

For example, you can use search engine marketing, either SEO or Pay-Per-Click, to capture leads and send them to your website. From there, say they fill out a form requesting more information. You provide said information, but they continue to shop around. You however, captured their email address and they agreed to opt-in to your monthly newsletter. Next month you send out your email, they never found a better solution and return to your website to make a purchase.

Of course, there are many different ways online marketing works; this is just one example to demonstrate how simple online marketing can be when it comes to building a base of clients and reaching new customers.

Online Is Cheaper and Easier
While print media is likely going to stay for some time, it is simply easier and faster to publish online. You can run a blog, website, social page, and newsletter for incredibly low amounts and publish all the content yourself. With print, you’re restricted to publication deadlines and sometimes have to pay exorbitant amounts for ad space. This, however, is not to say effective online marketing is cheap, only that it can cut down marketing costs.

As you can see, online marketing is nothing new; we’ve been doing it for years. However, why we use it is changing. Buyers are adapting to being sold, having likely experienced thousands of commercials, received hundreds of direct mail letters, listened to radio ads, and looked over newspaper editorials. Now they are experiencing blogs, sites, email, and social pages. Why is simple: it is an easier way to get information.

In his book “Commonsense Direct and Digital Marketing,” acclaimed marketer Drayton Bird highlights not only how direct marketing is still relevant, but how it can adapt to the buyer even more. While this blog post focuses more on the web part and goes beyond direct marketing, the points are still valid.

What is the purpose of direct marketing? Bird says it’s how you isolate each buyer and create a relationship with them. Sounds pretty relevant, right? There’s more. He says the main advantages of   direct marketing is how each customer is different, how you can build a relationship with them, and you can always test to see how that works.

Let’s leave aside the classic for a moment, and look at this in terms of web buyers. Your success in web marketing is defined by how you adapt to buyers, who are constantly changing in terms of wants and needs. The web buyer is changing, no doubt, but why?

Web buyers cannot be sold like they used to be. They are accessing traditional media less and new media more.  And technology is changing how buyers see and consider advertisements.

Why can’t web buyers be sold like other buyers?
They don’t conform to what you say they need. They listen less to the sales pitch, more on why this product can help them. In most cases, they ignore your ads and pitches. However, if you offer them benefits, such as saving time or saving money, and can do so without giving them a “sales” pitch, that’s just like a direct marketing ad selling to the individual on a more personal level.

Why are they accessing traditional media less?
This is an easy question to answer. Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn, WordPress, Blogger – the social media technologies are now overtaking printed material. Newspaper sales are down, press relations are being used in different ways, and more professional marketers are putting much more money into online advertising niches such as social networks, blogs, and email marketing.

How is technology changing marketing?
Buyers are accessing press releases on their own, for example. It used to be you went to the media companies to and submitted news releases to journalists. Now with sites like PRWeb and more, buyers are actively reading releases themselves (because search engines are picking them up). You know longer wait for advertisements to come to you via television, magazines, and mail. Now buyers are subscribing to company emails for items like sales, following interesting people and businesses on social networks, and reading blogs to find out immediate news.

This isn’t all new stuff, but it shows you why the buyer is changing, and how marketing is adapting. The point isn’t to say, “stop using traditional marketing,” but to point out that marketing, as always, is evolving.

The new rules of web marketing clearly put traditional marketing into the museum. Well, maybe not the museum, but the new rules of web marketing squeeze your dollar, increase niche product revenue, and introduce your product to more buyers than ever before.

Why is that? For many companies and industries, traditional advertising methods can waste money, while smaller amounts can have a more critical impact on a person-to-person level. With brands now using creative web marketing to up awareness about products, traditional advertising may seem like a dinosaur. Instead of wasting your money on one single shot, you can spread your marketing across more than magazines and TV: you can use banner ads, blogging, social marketing, affiliate marketing, and more.

Prior to web marketing, all businesses had was expensive advertising aimed at large segments who don’t care about the product and third party responses from the media. Now, you can direct web readers to literally hundreds if not thousands of your ads over the course of a year. The old axiom, a buyer needs to see your pitch several times, is only more proof on why web marketing should be used. If you just present your product once, your chances of selling are low. If you have several opportunities, the buyer at the least will notice your brand and at the most, decide to buy.

Web marketing does many things, but clearly being able to reach your specific target at just the right moment is key.

They may see your blog, your blog comments, your banner ads, your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Myspace pages. They may find articles published on your company website while searching for new products. This array of exposure is much better than traditional print and TV marketing.

What was the old way of traditional marketing like?

• Marketing was confined to advertising and branding
• Advertising had to pander to the masses instead of niche groups
• Advertising was focused on selling products
• Advertising and PR had no relationship

The new web marketing has clear advantages, namely in who you’re reaching out to, how you reach out to them, and when you reach out.

New web marketing creates brands, but more so, it focuses on niche groups. Here are a few of the movements in web marketing.

Facebook Marketing
Facebook has taken the world by storm, with user-friendly applications designed initially for conversation, but which soon became business portals for niche groups. You might not be interested in this group focused on cooking, but the other group on farming sounds interesting.

Twitter Marketing
Twitter is a second to Facebook, but with the potential to reach new niche audiences in one clear manner cannot be undervalued. While Twitter is small, it’s fast becoming a web marketing kingpin.

Blog Marketing
Blogs are more than a public relations portal. They build brands, get unique readers, and create interest via search engines to other unique niche buyers. Just like you’d hire someone to ghost write an article for you in a B2B magazine to get buzz for your name and business, you can do that and more with a updated and optimized blog. The usability of blogs make it simple for anyone to start one up, hosted or not.

We’re not saying in with the new and out with the old completely. Traditional advertising still has its place and will continue to offer valuable venues for distributing your marketing message. However, advertisers need to keep up with their target audience, and for most companies that requires going online.

Cory Doctorow, a now acclaimed science fiction novelist and professional blogger for Boing Boing, has an interesting take on the freedom of eBook publishing. And bear witness, it’s not quite gospel, but sometimes it sure sounds like it. He says he’s been giving away eBooks for free, and boy has he made some money off it.

His is a different story – the fact his books are fiction novels and collections of short stories – but for what this post is about, it’s even bigger. Giving away eBooks for free is not news, but why so many do it is often misunderstood.

Doctorow gave hundreds of thousands of copies of his first science fiction novel away for free. His rational was that you would be making money by those who chose to still buy the book, lose no money if readers who would not have otherwise picked the book the up did, and lose only some if a surprisingly low number of readers chose to read the eBook instead of the printed book. All his books have surpassed expectations on sales, and he’s now an acclaimed science fiction novelist.

The point here is that giving away free material, even if not as long as an eBook, has immense value in terms of branding. Doctorow was on the front page, so to speak, of hundreds of influential blogs and news sites when he did this. No, it’s not for everyone, but in terms of branding and marketing, it’s golden.

What will happen?
You commission someone to write an eBook for you, post it, and expect millions to just reach out. Depending on your business and marketing plan, various things might happen. First, you won’t be giving away millions of copies if you’re not well placed online. However, what will happen is, if the eBook is good, if you push it with many forms of marketing including social media, you can give away more copies. Now, those buyers if they like it might give your free eBook to a few more people or spread the word. Even if only 1,000 people read your book, if the subject is right, it can lead to more business. Why? You’re not just another business. You are showing expertise. You are becoming a hot brand, maybe in small business terms, but still a more known commodity. If you get 100 new clients because of it, most businesses would call that a success.

Why more sales?
People like free stuff, and in terms of giving away eBooks, some companies can see more effects than others. What’s interesting is that any company can do this to create more sales. There really are few who can’t say something in a short eBook. It can increase brand awareness, start to create a steady stream of prospects and buyers, and all for the cost of one free eBook you give away. More to the point, just as Doctorow used eBooks to build name power, so too can traditional businesses to get better known.

Build Your Brand
There are thousands of new eBooks given away every day, but what some fail to see is the real value. If you’re a small business with a tight marketing budget, in a crowded field, how can you stand out? If you’re a larger company in a more specific niche, you may wonder what you can do with a limited marketing budget. Giving away some form of free material – whether it’s a shorter white paper or a longer eBook – creates leads. That’s the main reason: you find more suitable prospects.

This is not all new material, but consider that by giving away information you’re telling more people about your expertise in a certain subject, and you’re also building buzz for your brand. If you, as many do, simply capture 1,000 emails by giving away a free eBook if someone subscribes, you’re doing more than building buzz: you can connect with many new prospects.

Target marketing is effective for all businesses but especially useful for small businesses needing to stand out and compete with smaller ad budgets. The more you know about your buyers, the more you’ll understand what they want and how to target them.

The problem is, no matter what you’re selling, online advertising can be expensive and has stiff competition. It does depend on your small business niche, but usually you have a clear buyer you are trying to reach. With Web marketing, you can target those buyers to be more effective.

Why Target Marketing?
Target marketing focuses on the specific audience you want to sell to. In short, the majority of people do not need your product. You need to target those who do. Some people have pets, and buy pet supplies. If you sell pet supplies, consumers who have no pets will never buy from you. Target marketing can save you time and money by directing your advertising toward smaller groups. Instead of reaching the whole world, you only want to target a smaller piece of the pie and can spend much less to get it.

Keyword Targeting
Keyword targeting concerns search engine marketing and contextual marketing. In both cases, you can narrow down your specific buyer with ease. If you rank highly for “pet supplies” on Google and Yahoo, you’re using search marketing. That would also be considered a short-tail keyword, a more basic search term.

Short tail keywords are very common and get good search volume, but the problem is the sheer number of sites competing for those keywords. If you are trying to rank well for “pet supplies,” you could get millions of hits, but you’d also have a large amount of competition, making it that much harder to rank well and even harder stand out. Using targeted keywords can help. 

A long-tail keyword is simply a more targeted search phrase, such as “Iams mature dog food”. That’s much more specific to the actual product the searcher is looking for and gives you have an immediate idea on what the buyer wants.

Searchers often get tired of sifting though page after page of results, and once they are done researching and are ready to make a purchase, will typically narrow their search by typing in keywords that are more specific. By focusing on targeted long-tail keywords, you can reach buyers with specific needs who are ready to make a purchase. In addition, you can also suggest additional products for them once they reach your site, since you already know a lot about them based just on their search terms.

Demographic Targeting
This is another useful way to narrow down your niche group of buyers, if not as effective as keyword targeting. For your small business, you can have a select group you know buys the most from you. A fashion store in Los Angeles might target women of a certain age, with a certain income, and using the English language. You can create demographic targeting in a variety of ways beyond that, such as interests and marital status. This directly markets to a target group most likely to buy your product or service.

Behavioral Targeting
The last target marketing method we’ll go over is the use of cookies to track users actions. This is rarely used by small businesses, but cookies enable companies to see what users are searching, reading, and buying online. “Cookies” work by recording your search history to better market to you. In other words, you may start seeing marketing more directly related to you, such as with online booksellers like Amazon.com, because what you’re doing is being tracked in order to better serve you. In some cases, prospects are against someone placing tracking info on their computer; most are harmless, but you must respect buyers’ privacy. Still, the better you know your prospect, the better chance you have of closing a sale.

Clearly, target marketing is very relevant online. If you can find out as much information as possible on prospects, you can stand apart as a business no matter your size. Once you target your best niche, you can turn more clicks into sales.