What type of internet advertising should I do?

If I was to approach an internet advertising agency, what should I ask them to spend my marketing budget on? In order to work out where your marketing money is best spent you need to look at what you are trying to achieve. What are your campaign goals? Who are your target audience? What kind of budget do you have?

Many people come to BDR London and say they want to do Internet advertising, but this term is so vast where do you begin? There are so many forms of internet marketing including seo, ppc, display, affiliate, email, PR, social media marketing and viral.

Let's go through each channel so you know what it is this will help us to answer your question.

SEO stands for search engine optimisation. It is the process of increasing your sites visibility in the search engines so your site appears in the organic or natural listings for your chosen keywords. This form of advertising is a long term business strategy as immediate results are unlikely. This form of advertising is not suitable to short term campaign goals.

PPC stands for Pay Per Click. PPC advertising allows you to bid on your target keywords so your site appears in the sponsored listings of search engines. PPC advertising is immediate and can be an ideal way to spend marketing budget if you want immediate results.

Display advertising also known as banner advertising is where you place banner creative onto websites. This form of advertising is very similar to placing an ad in a magazine or newspaper, but much better as your ad can be interactive and you can fully measure the response. By using your learnings you can refine your advertising as the campaign progresses to improve your ROI. Banner advertising is a great branding tool but can also be used for direct response campaigns.

Affiliate marketing is using thousands of websites to drive sales for you and the beauty is you only pay when a sale is made. Affiliate marketing enables you to grow your reach through niche sites; it's like having a huge commission only sales force. This form of advertising is perfect if your purchase process happens online as everything can be tracked and commission can be paid to whoever generated the sale.

Email marketing can be very effective. Whether you have an internal database or you rent highly targeted marketing lists the ROI can be excellent.

Online Public Relations is a great way to gain brand recognition. There are hundreds or PR release sites out there. If PR is done correctly you can also benefit from an SEO perspective too.

Social Media Marketing is about using social media to engage with your customers. It is a delicate form of communication as you must add value. Often these days social media marketing forms part of an SEO strategy.

Viral marketing is another tough technique to crack. It is difficult to make something go viral it tends to happen of its own accord, although there are techniques that can be employed to help seed your viral marketing activity.

If you want to run some internet advertising talk to BDR London we can assess your campaign objectives and budget and work out which form of marketing would be best for your business.