Remember, you're hunting for affordable and effective, not cheap and cruddy. Here are signs to search for before you can say you've found Internet marketing that's inexpensive yet powerful:
The company you're scouting must be able to design a website at no additional cost. It's not enough that it package the standard SEO, competition analysis, and keyword density work in the marketing plan; web design must also be bundled in so that it's tied up with the marketing. This way, your website's needs are met in one place and with less complication.
Make sure that your page is also on top of the searching game. The Internet has more than a dozen high-traffic search engines (SE's) and your site should show up on all of them. If you want to say that your site is perfectly SE-compatible, it must be SE-optimized.
Before I go on, let's step back a moment and review what we're doing. Or rather, these are the questions you should be discussing when interviewing or considering potential advertising vendors, whether online, or otherwise.
How do you bring value to the market, and how do you compete in the marketplace overall? I am constantly amazed at how common sense and existing good business practices get left behind when some businesses plunge into internet marketing. The following looks like a paragraph out of a Business 101 primer.
"Remember the old saying, 'Keep your friends close and your enemies closer'? Bear that in mind. You should know your competition like you know your compadres. Your marketing plans should always account for the strengths and weaknesses of Brand X."
Duh. If anything, it's much easier to do competitive analysis online, as at least the public-facing messages are available to compare in an instant. But somehow, some folks seem to have gotten so distracted by the mechanics of how to get more eyesballs to a webpage that they forget what game they're playing. Like when the content of the site itself fails to even hit the main points of their unique selling proposition.
One just scratches one's head.
And here's another one: Before anything else, even the standard HTML editors and website-building software prompt you to enter keywords and a meta-description.while a site is being built. Is not it logical (assuming you want your site to be found by lots and lots of people) that describing your site in a few words and short phrases might give you a ranking advantage over one that does not? ESPecially since that's what search-engine users actually see in their search results.
But there does seem to be a disconnect, even among those of us who are otherwise intelligent. Perhaps some of us have forgotten – even though the functionality and multimedia capabilities of websites have grown tremendously in just a few short years, that the initial purpose of a website was to publish a version or equivalent of a simple business brochure on-line. If it does not do at least as much good to get your site in front of prospective customers, why bother? Good paper marketing pieces can still be effective. Bad ones, by definition, are not. The same goes for web content and design.
Back to the search for low-cost yet effective campaigns. In order to consider it an effective, aggressive Internet marketing plan it should include, as well as what was already mentioned, strong technical support, ongoing updates, original web content that is in-demand, and back-link building campaigns. And since it's an ongoing process, with one campaign leading to another, a monthly fee is commonly charged to maintain the marketing plan. So as I have written elsewhere, the company you hire to handle this area for you needs to be as compatible with how you work as you might wish the ideal spouse to be.
