Internet Marketing – an alternative to Yell

Although Yell has naturally advanced to make use of Internet technologies in recent years, it still works fundamentally as a directory. While there is certainly a place for this within marketing efforts, as it has a tried and tested record when it comes to connecting businesses to customers, the Internet offers a whole range of other marketing opportunities that can have a huge impact on your success.

The days of traditional marketing, which basically consisted of advertising directly about your products and services, are long gone. The Internet together with the growth of social media have fundamentally changed the ways that people interact, and therefore also the ways that business reach their potential customers.

New models

Internet marketing campaigns such as Google AdWords together with various similar models give you the ability to target your marketing more effectively, reaching more people than would have been possible before, while minimising the costs spent on marketing within your company.

Target

The way that people browse the Web is integral to these marketing approaches, as many of them use the context to best place your marketing materials. For example, the basic AdWords technique is where you choose a set of keywords that are associated with your site or product, such that you want one of your adverts to appear whenever someone has carried out a Google search for those keywords.

This means that your ads are only displayed where there is a good chance that the person viewing the page will be interested in your product. The advantages to this are that you both reach the people who are most likely your potential customers, and also that you don’t waste your marketing efforts in contexts where this is less likely.

Budgets

The other main advantage is that these approaches give you the ability to manage your marketing costs more effectively. A number of different pricing models are used, the main ones being Pay Per Click (where you pay a fee whenever someone clicks on your ad) and Impressions based (where you pay a fee for the number of times that your ads actually end up appearing on web pages).

Flexible

As well as allowing you to minimise the costs involved, these models also have a lot of built in flexibility so that you can focus on different areas at different times, adjust your campaigns continuously and generally have a much higher degree of control over your marketing than in traditional models.

Using the Web

When it comes to the older marketing models, such as directories like Yell, you are basically relying on people to come and find you if they’re looking for a particular service. Naturally you still have to compete with the alternatives that they see, and while there is still a place for this type of marketing, it certainly does not make the best use of the Web for your business.

Internet marketing allows you to reach your customers when they’re going about their Web business, browsing sites or using search engines, while presenting minimal costs and allowing you to more easily balance these with the returns that you’re seeing.

To find out more about how you can promote your website through Internet Marketing contact us on 01457 857111 or download our Internet Marketing Means Business leaflet.