I’m going to go through a few things that are important in today’s day and age when doing email marketing campaigns. Whether it’s a one off campaign or your general company newsletter, there are a few things that you can do to improve deliverability and response on your campaigns.

Read the full article on email marketing here.

The other side of the coin in online marketing is ‘online marketing real estate’. Online marketing companies are constantly looking to find high traffic websites on which they can market their clients’ products and services. Further, if you have a large database of clients/users that have opted in to receive further information, all the better.

So what’s important to take into consideration when looking for advertisers?

Niche

Is the topic/theme of your website conducive to advertising? Do you have a sufficient sized community that regularly visits the website? It’s important to note that if you’ve chosen a popular niche that your website is clearly a cut above the rest in terms of relevance and being up to date. Search engines will award your with traffic if they realise that you’re providing your users with relevant content and that in turns bring traffic which brings me to my next point.

Traffic

Targeted traffic is very important. If you can show potential advertisers that you’re receiving a big load of relevant traffic each month in a specific niche, you have feet to stand on.

Know your users

You’re flying blind if you don’t know who’s using your website. First and foremost ensure that you have proper stats installed (try Google Analytics to start with). Secondly, try and capture some of your market via user registrations and newsletter subscriptions, as that will enable you to better profile your website users. Profile your users according to their preferences as well as age, gender, location and more. Try and find a balance between being overbearing and something your users will feel comfortable in sharing. If you can present a breakdown of your profiles and number of users within those profiles it will help agencies match potential advertisers with your website.

Ensure you can handle ads

Ensure that your website layout has dedicated areas for advertising. Don’t overdo it of course as clutter will cause your users to go blind to your ads. Do you have ad serving software in place? There are small and large scale solutions for serving ads. The simplest is Adsense of course, but if you really want to manage it properly a proper ad serving platform is required. Something like DoubleClick can be of great use and advertisers look out for credible ad serving solutions as part of their decision making processes. These ad serving platforms also provide you with great analytics which you can provide to potential advertisers.

Channels

Your website is not your only media channel, if you have a large subscriber database you can open up revenue opportunities by selling ad space in your newsletters as well. Further you can segment the different sections on your website as high target niches for advertising to better serve advertisers. Develop your channels over time and monetise accordingly!

Talk to potential advertisers

Once you have everything sorted on your website, start targeting potential advertisers. Advertising Agencies are generally a good bet, but online marketing agencies even better as they generally handle online media buying for their clients. Also prepare to pay commissions to agencies that handle their client accounts. Generally they would negotiate a cost per click or per 1000 impressions for placing ads on your website.

It’s not always easy to build up such a successful platform, but it can surely be lucrative once you get to that stage.

Talk to PERONii Solutions if you’re interested in a consulting session on monetising your website or if you’re in need of online marketing specialists to look at promoting your products and services

With many companies heaving under global economic pressure, it’s important to revise your marketing strategies to reach your markets by the more affordable and measurable means of online marketing.

Online marketing has always been lower priority for many large corporates in their marketing campaigns, but this is set to change as radio, print and television advertising budgets dwindle.

By employing various online media like search, pay per click, email and social networks you can spread out your budgets effectively and with real time stats, executives and marketing managers can quickly change direction to focus on the avenues  that deliver high returns.

PERONii assists companies in developing sound online marketing strategies and to implement these strategies effectively. Our experience in online marketing allows us to make recommendations up front to maximise the efficiency of your online marketing spend. Comprehensive reporting also provide the means for quick decision making by our clients.

We have never recommended that companies entirely forfeit traditional marketing spend for online marketing, but in these times we would recommend at least 30-40% spend of marketing budgets online. In the UK the current figure hovers just under 20% of total marketing budgets being spent online. It’s less than 1% behind press and TV advertising and is said to surpass these within the next year or two.

If you’d like to find out what online marketing can do for your company, kindly fill out a free quote request form.

Sometimes start-ups and small companies don’t have large budgets to kick off online marketing campaigns. There are however quite a few FREE and low cost things that can be done to improve your website / business popularity.

Below is a short list of a few things you can look into to promote your business online, whether you have a website or not. BTW, if you’re looking for building a quick, free website, check out www.synthasite.com – they have some amazing new features and it’s as simple as drag and drop to build your website…

Blogging

Blogging has really come of age, and large corporates are even using it to create a more personal touch in communicating with their customers. There are many free blogging platforms (eg www.blogsome.com, www.blogger.com) which will allow you to set up your free blog.

Most blogging platforms come with RSS feeds, which gives you an easy way to syndicate the content that you write on your blog. You can plug that feed into blog aggregating portals like Digg.com, Afrigator (for South African blogs) and more to receive votes for your submitted articles, thereby increasing the visibility of your blog.

There are also dedicated blog search platforms, so just by writing a blog you increase your chances of exposure quite well. That said, don’t oversell your services and products. Rather take the approach of giving sound advice for free, build up a good relationship with your readers and then expose your readers to possibly marketing opportunities you might have.

Social Media

Social media is not always the desired platform to market your products or services, but in certain cases (if your products are geared towards the social environment) you could do very well. There are also dedicated social business to business platforms like www.linkedin.com and www.mygenius.com where you can create a profile for yourself and contribute while also relaying some marketing information to promote yourself.

Email Marketing

Email is still one of the most effective ways of marketing your business. There are some great bulk email providers out there with which you can add a “sign up” form on your website and have a professional newsletter DIY style (since they come with templates ready made). It’s not FREE, but still a good investment to make since you get realtime stats of how well any particular email campaign is doing.

On the FREE side you have your normal email client, like Outlook. Be sure to update your signature regularly, maybe with a one liner pitch of your latest product and a link to your website for more information. By using conventional email you’re essentially marketing your business every time you send out an email. Also remember the golden 90 day rule of contact. Try and stay in contact with prospects and existing customers at least once every 90 days to keep up that relationship.

Relationship management is one of the essential tools in marketing, so use it effectively, it’s free!

With email also comes various sub formats of email campaigns, which I’ll briefly mention:

• Viral Email Campaigns (not free, but can be very effective!) – You send a mail out to your existing database and they are asked to send the email on to a few friends, who all get the original email. Your database grows virally and suddenly you’re sitting with a load of new prospects. Please make sure however that you make use of online marketing professionals to assist in setting up these kind of campaigns.
• Competitions – Incentivised email campaigns with some profiling questions – if you profile your database you’ll be able to target subsets of your data the next email campaign round, and ensure higher levels of uptake on your offers.
• Surveys – Good way of measuring your ‘effectiveness’ in the market and also for profiling purposes. Can be incentivised.
• RSVP’s – Show your customers that you’re with the times and have an automated RSVP system. Good for events and extended brand awareness! The alternative would be FaceBook events, but not everyone’s on Facebook…

Web PR / Article Syndication

Web PR is the process of setting up public relation channels for distributing company news. There are some excellent portals for doing online PR, and by using the authoritive ones you enable your news to be syndicated to a wide range of websites. By adding a small biography on your articles with a link back to your site, you’re also busy link building (part of search engine optimisation) in the process. This increases the popularity of your website or blog! Check out www.prweb.com.

Google AdWords

This is a great way of promoting your website, products and services. You’re able to set daily limits on your spend and target exact or broad search phrases on which your ads will show. Every time someone clicks on your ad, you pay, and from there the term Pay-Per-Click. You also bid against competing advertisers for specific phrases, so costs will vary. It can however be as low as $0.10 per click. The great thing about AdWords is that you control how much you want to spend and it’s also a great way of bridging the gap until your organic search rankings start picking up. I would recommend speaking to an internet marketing consultancy first to assist in setting up and optimising your campaigns.

That’s it for now, if you have any questions or would like toget a free quote, please visit our website here.