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The most profound effect of communication revolution that the world saw in the last decade was that it made distances shrunk exponentially, continents became accessible in the matter of seconds, and the presumed response time in every facet dipped, making even few minutes lagged on any interaction a major delay. This is the change the World Wide Web has inculcated in the world of communication, something that was never witnessed or anticipated before. Now internet is synonymous with communication and a web face is an inevitability for most businesses across the globe. But the scope of internet has extended much beyond to encompass virtually every aspect of business from advertising to market research, talent hunt and internet marketing. Here we talk about the latter of the ones mentioned, the internet marketing.

Whichever be the business, in order to market a product, one need to have some sort of interaction with a customer and the success of the entire ordeal depends on how well the marketing person could convince the customer. Generally, the marketing guy manages it through a personal meeting or a phone call. Internet marketing does exactly this - marketing - but the medium here is the internet or the World Wide Web. And in this globalised world, not giving priority to internet marketing means you are putting your business at a great disadvantage. Conversely, having a strategic internet marketing plan in place is crucial for any business to compete with its rivals in terms of visibility, market penetration and yes, in amassing a solid customer base.

Strategic internet marketing ponders over the planning and execution of an internet marketing campaign in order to maximize the ROI and is the biggest of the challenges in the whole marketing ordeal. It answers questions pertaining to budget allocation, most effective methods to reach to the customers online and in laying down a comprehensive online marketing plan based on the analysis of the current online environment, competitors and the industry and its market trends.

A well managed and closely managed set of five factors that generally works for every type internet marketing can be briefed as seen below,

* Search Engine Optimization

* E-mail Marketing

* Pay-Per-Click Marketing (PPC)

* Managed Support

Before seeing each of these aspects in detail, let me make clear the difference between Marketing Strategy and Marketing Tactic. A marketing strategy lays down the general approaches a business firm would take to reach to its objectives in hand. On the other hand, a marketing tactic refers to the actions the firm should take in order to bring the marketing strategies to take effect. Offering an email newsletter and submitting /listing the site to targeted search engines and directories come under the latter category.

Now back to internet marketing strategy and its intricacies. The penetration your site could bring about in the customer population depends upon the visibility your site has in the internet. That is, if somebody searches for the site through a search engine, where it gets listed in the search results - on the first 10 or 20 or on the last page? Search Engine Optimization addresses this problem exactly. It is an analytic means by which the factors that eventually results in a better list ranking in search results are studied and found out, and the site is then modified or redesigned accordingly. Keyword analysis, dynamic optimization and tactical link exchange program are some aspects worked out in Search Engine Optimization.

Email marketing - as the term suggests - reach out to the customers through emails. This strategy helps to build a list of opt-in customers and prospects, which can be put into use further in ongoing marketing campaigns by means of direct emails, weekly specials, seasonal discounts, and newsletters, to name a few.

If you are ready to shell out some ready money, then Pay-Per-Click Marketing (PPC) is an effective option. In this method, the money-per-click inspires the search engines to list your name in a most visible format always. There are exclusive pay-per-click search engines like Overture, FindWhat.com and 7Search.com, which return the results of a search depending on how much the advertiser bid for the ad placement.

The most important of all these are the extent of services you - as a business - offer to the customers. The final result of all the online and offline marketing efforts are graded on such a backdrop and hence it goes without saying that the managed support or continued service is that what cements confidence in the customer’s mind. And as long as customers have a larger part to play in the success/failure of a business, one cannot disappoint them, and that is exactly what every marketing strategy should look forward to.

Prasanth S
Freelance Writer
prasanths@inbox.com

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With consumers taking charge of what they read and when they read it, online news has attracted the interest of marketers. The new report Search Marketing Benchmark Guide from Marketing Sherpa tips optimized online press releases and the combination of PR and SEO as one of the top three Internet marketing strategy trends in 2006.

According to this report search optimization spending increased in 2005, but it is still a fraction of the money being spend on search advertising and pay per click.

“The one, undeniable truth of search marketing is that across all major engines organic results (those that show up in natural “free” listings) are better noticed, read, and clicked on than the paid listings,” says the report.

77% of surfers get their news online today. Yahoo News has the largest online news audience and an online optimized press release in Yahoo News and Google News can give a quick boost your search engine marketing. You’ll be on page one in the news search for your keywords within twenty-four hours.

Eye track studies show that the pay per click and sponsored ads (e.g. down the right side of a Google search) get less than 50 percent of the searchers’ attention and on average get only 30 percent of the clicks.

Makes sense - people buy a newspaper to read the news, not the ads. You don’t turn on the TV to watch the ads.

The best Internet marketing strategy would be to have a strong presence in the news section of the search engines. “PR plants the seed. Advertising harvests the crop,” wrote Jack Trout and Al Ries, authors of best selling books on positioning.

Publicity in the form of news articles molds public opinion so that your target audiences are more susceptible to advertising or other promotions. The purpose of public relations is to gain awareness and acceptance of your brand -then advertising can be undertaken to forward the brand message.

Every company has a good story to tell. If it is well-written and optimized for the news search engines, an online press release will get more exposure and help improve the visibility of your web site

It seems that there is something magical about news coverage - the public accept it but pass ads right on by. With more and more people getting their news on the Internet, it’s vital to also use online optimized press releases that include “key words” (the words that your prospects are using to find you or your competitors) links back to your site and a measurement system that can track the results not only on the press release, but also the clicks to your site and the visitor actions on your site.

One caveat: Be sure to find someone who really understands the combination of PR and SEO. Some so-called ‘experts’ in press release optimization may not be as skilled at optimizing and tracking results as others. Check their references and results carefully.

Sally Falkow has created effective internal and external communication strategies for both large and medium sized enterprises for 25 years. Since 1999 Ms. Falkow has translated her extensive experience in communication to the Internet and is now one of the leading web site and Internet marketing strategists in the U.S. Her web reviews and Internet marketing strategies using RSS feeds, blogs, and online optimized press releases have kept our clients on the forefront of technology.

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The internet marketing landscape has changed quite a bit in the past 3 years and has further defined itself further in the past 12 months. With Google raising $4 Billion from new stock offerings in 2005 we will see more changes underway over the next 3 years. Unfortunately, I fear the small business is going to be left out in the cold in this process. Perhaps a better statement would be that the small business has already been left out in the cold.

This writing is certainly not designed to provide a solution to the growing problem. More so, it has been written to raise the awareness and acknowledge the difficulty small business has on the web. Certainly the small business does not receive any sympathy from the major search engines in their quest to provide quality information for those that are searching the web.

Let’s review how the situation has been created. We have to make the assumption a small business does not have the financial resources for a proper advertising campaign on the web (even though it is less costly than offline advertising) and they do not have the man-power to devote time for the non-costly methods of marketing. Yes, I have distinguished between advertising and marketing.

Marketing is the process or technique of promotion, selling and distributing a product or service. Advertising is to make your product or service publicly known; an announcement to call public attention by emphasizing qualities to arouse a desire to purchase.

Can the small business market at no cost? Yes, absolutely, however, the issue at hand is not expenditure but time. Time they are already spending on their business and do not have more time to spend on non-costly marketing methods on the web. What are these non-costly but time-consuming marketing methods? This would include but not limited to writing articles, maintaining newsletters, maintaining email addresses with auto-responders, submitting their articles through a variety of methods and resources over the web. Let’s not forget standard search engine optimization issues and HTML coding. Oh, the best one of all is “natural” link exchanging as defined by Google. If you have not already been there, manual link exchanging is a time consuming process even if you do decide to spend money on lost cost services that can assist. You cannot use “link farms” as that is against search engine policies and will cause your listing to be down graded.

In order to reach top ranking on the search engines it all boils down to links (or link exchanges, link popularity) and content. Inbound only links better than reciprocal inks. Writing content for your site, articles, news, newsletter is time consuming to properly write a 500 word article and the submission process is not easy either. Some services and software exists to help you in your submission of articles, but just like link exchange services they can only do so much. Could you create a blog and place your articles, certainly. However, you can see the “things to do” list only keeps growing for the small business owner.

Could they engage in pay-per-click campaigns? Sure, however, you now are entering in a financial issue and one that does not necessarily provide a great return on investment. Pay-Per-Click campaigns are good as an overall marketing strategy and if you use it in combination with a variety of other internet and search engine marketing methods. On its own it cannot provide the returns the small business is seeking. Searching the key phrases (no longer key words) and understanding which ones to select is equally not an easy task. It requires due diligence, research and analysis to understand the information and make an informed decision. Assuming they can get past this part of the pay-per-click process, the next phase is writing the pay-per-click ad headline and content. Unfortunately we see many small businesses flocking to pay-per-click advertising in hopes of a quick return. They might as well go to a casino!

There is indeed another problem associated with Pay-Per-Click campaigns. The ratio of exposures to hits is equally a problem when you are supposed to keep a certain percentage ratio between the two. When search engines like Google are allowing your ad to be placed on other websites with their Google Adsense, your exposures are indeed going up, however, how many people actually click on the links? From Google’s perspective probably a lot, but from the individual advertiser’s perspective this is not necessarily a good situation. Google is now dictating what key phrases you “should” bid on and ultimately consolidating the bidding war into small key phrase groups and larger number of advertisers.

Lastly, at least for this writing, but not necessarily on the subject, is time to see revenues. There is no doubt that it takes months for a website to propagate through the Internet. This is by no means a short-term situation and expectations need to be set accordingly. Just because you have a website does not mean that you will see rewards anytime soon. Once again we get into the dilemma of time resources to do the necessary internet marketing work in order to see benefits 6 - 9 months later.

Requirements set by the search engines as they seek to provide quality responses to those that are searching are making it increasingly difficult for small businesses to compete on the web. So, who will end up on the first page or in the top position of searches for key phrases? Unless something changes and the small business is given a chance, it will be the larger corporations that have the man power time and the money.

Melih Oztalay is the CEO of SmartFinds Internet Marketing. SmartFinds Internet Marketing provides a variety of business internet marketing services including research, analysis and planning.

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