Low-Budget Online Marketing. Holly Berkley

products, coupons, and contests are great ways to get the demographic information you need. Emphasize the fact that visitors can trust your company by putting a privacy policy in a prominent place on your website, stating that you will not share their personal information with outside parties and vendors. And, most important, adhere to this policy. Getting your customers’ private demographic information is the same as getting their trust. Don’t abuse their trust by selling their information.

      Knowing the demographics of your customer will help you better spend your marketing dollars and get the most out of your online promotions. A few years ago, market share was king. Today, the success of a website is determined by the quality of the traffic, not the quantity. The key to a successful website and online marketing strategy is to be as targeted as possible, even if that leaves you with a smaller audience.

      Banner Ads Rely on Placement

      When we first launched our Baja travel website, we wanted to buy some banner ads on Yahoo! After all, at the time, Yahoo! was the most popular site on the Internet. We pulled together our meager budget and purchased about 100,000 impressions on the main Yahoo! Travel page. We sat back and waited for the traffic to come rolling in. The result was more than disappointing. We made the number one mistake most first-time online marketers make; we tried to reach the greatest amount of people, rather than a few of the right people. First of all, our 100,000 impressions were completed in a matter of hours and we got a 0.02 percent click-through rate. And of the 0.02 percent who visited our website, not one person purchased anything. The campaign was a complete waste of marketing dollars. We knew we had to rethink our strategy — fast.

      First off, I do not recommend buying banner ads, especially if you are on a limited budget. Banner ads can be effective at branding your company — if you have a large enough budget, negotiate some long-term contracts with prominent websites in your industry — but the actual click-through results are often so low that they are not cost-effective.

      If you do choose to buy banner ads, the most cost-effective strategy is to buy them on a very targeted page. The more targeted the page, the cheaper the ad, and the more results you will get. Take our Baja website, for example. Rather than buying a banner ad on Yahoo!’s main Travel page, we should have dug deeper into the Yahoo! Travel site and looked up Mexico, then Baja, then determined which sites were already ranked number one on Yahoo! or were partners with Yahoo! Travel services.

      We later went ahead and purchased banners on those sites, at a fraction of the cost of banners on the main Yahoo! Travel page. These sites did not get as much traffic as Yahoo! Travel, but the traffic they did get was more likely to click on our banner ad and purchase our products. These banner ads proved much more successful for us. The banners were cheaper, and the click-through rate averaged 4 percent, which is higher than the industry standard rate of 2 percent.

      Another example of targeting your banner ad placement is embedding it in content. Before you buy an ad, ask the website editors what types of stories or promotions they may be doing that would relate to your business, then ask for ads on those pages. If the site has a keyword search, ask to have your banners come up when words associated with your primary product or service are entered.

      The deeper the page in the site, the better, because you will be reaching visitors who are truly searching for your information. This strategy is directly aimed at those companies looking to get the most value for their online marketing dollar. For companies with a larger budget, I would recommend buying banners on the home pages for branding purposes. However, branding is expensive, with the average cost of establishing a dominant online brand estimated at $80 million USD. So for the purpose of online marketing on a shoestring budget, don’t waste your time or money on home page banner ads. (For more on online ad buys, see Chapter 9.)

      Use Worksheet 1 to help you determine who your target audience really is.

       Worksheet 1: Discovering Your Target Audience

      Chapter 2 examined the importance of defining your target audience before starting an online marketing campaign. Think about the following demographics, and check off the ones that apply to your product or service. In some cases, the answer may be “all of the above.” However, remember that general marketing is expensive. The more specific you can be about whom you are trying to reach, the cheaper and more cost-effective your online marketing campaign will be.

       Gender

      [ ] Male

      [ ] Female

       Age Group

      [ ] Under 18

      [ ] 18–24

      [ ] 25–29

      [ ] 30–34

      [ ] 35–39

      [ ] 40–49

      [ ] 50–60

      [ ] Over 60

       Annual Household Income Level

      [ ] Less than $25,000

      [ ] $25,000–$34,999

      [ ] $35,000–$49,999

      [ ] $50,000–$69,999

      [ ] $70,000–$99,999

      [ ] $100,000–$200,000

      [ ] More than $200,000

       Education Level

      [ ] High school

      [ ] Bachelor’s Degree

      [ ] Graduate Degree

       Marital Status

      [ ] Married

      [ ] Single

      [ ] Divorced

       Children?

      [ ] Yes

      [ ] No

      Possible Occupations: __________________________________

       (professional, administrative, labor)

      Geographic Location: __________________________________

       (specific cities, states, regions, or countries)

      Ethnicity: _____________________________________________

       (Caucasian, Hispanic, Asian, etc.)

       What type of Internet user is your target customer?

      [ ] Novice

      [ ] Intermediate

      [ ] Advanced

       Where will your target customers use a computer?

      [ ] Home

      [ ] Office

      [ ] Other

       What types of hobbies do they have? (E.g., fishing, camping, traveling)

      ______________________________________________________

      ______________________________________________________

       Other important characteristics your ideal customer would have:

      ______________________________________________________

      ______________________________________________________

      Now, list at least ten websites below that you think the above customer would visit. These are the types of websites you should want to buy ads on, form partnerships with, or emulate in content and design.