THE WEB HOMBYZ.com

ADD A LINK

TEST-DRIVE THE HOTTEST HOME BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY OF THE DECADE  ADVERTISEMENT

Online Marketing Without Breaking The Bank   

by: IWAACA

Marketing is getting more expensive to implement through traditional advertising channels. 

Google now controls the largest percentage of the marketing and advertising market and is setting the price bar higher than most small businesses can afford. 

Yahoo and MSN falls a distance second and third in terms of market capital, but even this isn't stopping them from charging high advertising and marketing fees.

Some businesses feel that they just cannot afford not to do business with these companies and the fact is, they are likely correct. However, what many business operators are not aware of is the thousands of other marketing opportunities that are available at considerably lower costs. 

It's these marketing opportunities that can allow marketing budgets to go further and reach targeted markets (in my opinion) more effectively.

Marketing effectiveness is based on several factors, but what appears to work today - may not work tomorrow. So, the more prepared and creative the marketing approach is, then the more likely it will catch the attention of the attended audience that it was created to draw. Yes, creativity and originality are just but two keys that seem to be working in the present marketing environment. 

However, developing a creative and original marketing plan is not all that cheap to plan. The money that can be saved through using advertising and marketing channels that are considered the non-traditional approach will save the money that could be spent on developing a winning marketing plan. It sound so easy and really it is, once it is understood where to go to find these alternatives.

Let's begin with exploiting the benefits of online social community networking. Networking yourself and your brand is so important nowadays and there are hundreds of such social networking communities established online. The biggest and most popular is Myspace with more than 119 million members and ranked amongst the highest visited sites on the web. 

Next, would be Facebook and then, maybe Tagged as the next most popular by both membership and website traffic. There are others, but for the sake of keeping this article relatively brief, I'll leave the others for another article.

Developing a presence in these social networking communities are completely free to get started. Myspace and Tagged both offers its members networking tools to enable them to invite other members to visit their personal community page. Using these tools correctly can lead to effective marketing for developing a brand, image or product. 

Using the Add a Friend tool on Myspace can before you know it, increase your personal network by leaps and bounds. Once a friend network has been established, then you can start sending out bulletins to every person in your network a few times a month. Be careful not to go overboard, because too many bulletins can be considered spamming and get your page removed from the network.

Another effective marketing platform is manually selecting websites that contain relative content that closely matches that of the brand or product that your are offering. 

Purchasing advertising directly through websites that are selected by your marketing team can costs considerably less than paying for PPC (Price-Per-Click) advertising via the traditional advertising brokers.

The ads that you purchase through this direct approach will remain on the sites for the entire day, week or month depending on which advertising plan that you selected. The longer that an advertising banner or text-link remains on a website, then the better it should do. 

Consumers do not in general response the first time that they see an ad and in many cases will not do so until they need or want what is being offered through the ad. This is good news, because these consumers are in the buying mood and the click-through stands a much better chance of producing a sale.

I personally use a combination of sites to locate the best and most relevant websites to purchase ad space from. These sites are Alexa website ranking service and Adbrite, because Alexa provides the statistics of the website's ranking overall on the Internet and Adbrite has thousands of website advertising opportunities to purchase direct advertising space. Both of these services can be a valuable marketing tool, especially when worked together.

But, no advertising or marketing plan can be complete without considering and implementing an offline marketing campaign. There are thousands of opportunities to build brand awareness in the real world. 

Some costs a lot of funding to execute an effective marketing and advertising campaign, while other approaches are very cost-effective.

Television and radio advertising campaigns are by far the most expensive to exploit, but there are thousands of newspapers where small ads costs as little as $3.00 to $25.00 per ad. Some cable networks offer fairly inexpensive advertising plans, but the downside is that the ads will not generally be aired during primetime hours. 

Usually, the ads will air early in the morning, noon and late evening. Radio commercials are especially expensive for marketing products and brands that must be seen to convert people to profits. For the right products and brands radio can be very effective when using a catchy jingle or slogan to hook the audience and target market to the brand or product.

Besides the traditional media channels, there are other marketing steps that can be investigated like product giveaways, running a contest or sponsoring a sports team or charity event. First of all, people like freebies and tee-shirts, ball caps and coffee mugs with logos and website addresses are not only effective marketing tools, but smart product giveaways will solve a problem or provide a use to the consumer. 

Its these types of marketing giveaways that will be seen about more people more often, every time the recipient wears the tee-shirt or ball cap out in the public.

After reading this article you have now have the tools to get started planning a cost-effective marketing campaign to create brand awareness for your product or website. So, bust a move without breaking the bank and try some of these marketing approaches for yourself. Its money time!

For more tips: www.iwaaca.com

*****************************************************************

PERMISSIONS TO REPUBLISH: This business article may be republished in its entirety free of charge, electronically or in print, provided it appears with the included copyright and author’s resource box with live website link.

Courtesy of: The Home Business Specialist