Cost Effective Internet Marketing

When drawing up a cost-effective marketing campaign, you must simultaneously juggle long-term strategic concerns and short-term tactical issues. Small business developers often hear contradictory advice about online marketing. They are told to set goals and stick with them.

They are also told to stay flexible, open to change, and ready to adopt new technologies and techniques. The truth is that both types of “advertising wisdom” can be applied.

Plan and Budget for Internet Marketing

Start by setting a budget and a plan for your long-term cost-effective marketing initiative. How should your marketing plan integrate with your business goals? Where do you see your company in five years? What are your projections for your competitors and your suppliers? You don’t have to create absolute projections, you just need ballpark figures to inform your short-term “tactical” cost-effective marketing ideas.

Once you generally outline your cost-effective marketing strategy, you can use your budget numbers to come up with ROI goals for various campaigns. For instance, let’s say that you need to sell 200,000 widgets to supplier ‘x’ by November to create the profits needed to stay in line with your five-year plan. You can then test a number of different ad ideas to move those 200,000 units. You would be surprised at the sense of freedom you’ll get once you have parameters hemming in your marketing campaign.

This may seem counterintuitive at first. After all, if you have an unlimited budget to sell those 200,000 widgets, you could theoretically go in any direction. However, if you have a budget cap, say $50,000 that you must maintain to meet your long-term strategic objectives, you’ll actually narrow your focus faster.

You can take that $50,000, for instance, and allot a certain percentage for a Pay Per Click ad campaign and a certain amount for website development. You could then create teams to optimize various campaigns, set up metrics to measure progress, and develop an infrastructure to share results.

Narrow Your Internet Marketing Target

Finally, bear in mind that “cost-effective marketing” should be relatively defined. If your campaign generates a massive ROI that’s under your budget expectations, it’s not necessarily successful. Conversely, if you eek by into the black and still do better than planned, a campaign can nevertheless be considered successful.

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