Features
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Online Advertising. What works?
For the last few years, advertisers have been frantically working to standardize internet advertising and make it productive and viable. In 2001, Forrester Research, Inc. did a study on "What activities do people take time from to spend time on the computer?" With multiple responses accepted, 78% of people chose watching TV as the one thing that they took time away from to spend on the computer surfing the web. The closest thing to second place was sleeping at 24%.
This has caused traditional media plans for advertisers to follow these audiences to the internet, because that's where they're spending their time now. Ad placement companies scrambled to justify relevant ad costs and measuring metrics. So, we know that online advertising is here to stay, but what types of avenues work and how much of your marketing budget should you direct toward this?
We have a few things to keep in mind when advertising online.
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Spending patterns are various. Consumer brands spend only a small fraction of their budgets online. |
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Technology companies spend as much as five times more of their brand dollars and they tend to spend it on particular sites that have their audiences attention. |
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Banner campaigns don't have a standard. Lock in low rates where you can and saturating a few sites is better than spreading across many. |
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Web advertising continues to establish "best practices" with regard to what to charge for what is given. Always request information substantiating what advertising costs are based upon. |
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Personalized, targeted e-zines are becoming a larger avenue of focused advertising. The list the e-zine is sent to is the key. Know who you're targeting. |
What types of choices do you have?
There are mainly three types of avenues that you can use. You can build: (1) a destination site, (2) micro-sites or (3) banner campaigns. There is a growing fourth category of e-mail marketing and e-zine advertisements that can be used to directly target your customer base. The distribution list is key.
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Destination Sites: If the web enables you to offer a product or service, faster, cheaper or better, then a destination site can be the answer. Destination sites use various other forms of information and entertainment to bring customers back over and over. Destination sites also have a larger responsibility to provide dynamic exchanges of information with it's customers. Hence a larger expense for development and maintenance. |
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Micro-Sites: If your product or service can be researched, enable viewers to dig deeper for product benefits and collect customer information, but without the hassle of a full-blown web site, then you need a micro-site. These miniature sites function within targeted audience specific web sites. For example: Online consumer magazines, publications and portals/directories. They are less cost-intensive and less maintenance. |
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Banner Advertisements: These are the standard animated graphical banners placed on various targeted sites that supposedly receive the eyes of your targeted viewers. Banners can be simple focused messages allowing viewers to click-through to your site for more information. Rates vary, so work with the ad placement agency to buy smart and request measurable results. |
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Targeted E-zines: More and more today, your e-mail box is filling up with targeted, permisssion-based, e-mail newsletters from every known company that you have either purchased from or inquired from. These are information rich and offer some great opportunities to sponsor or simple place advertising banners or links into. Again, the list of who it is distributed to is the key. |
Whether you choose to advertise now or later. Online advertising is here to stay and now more than ever your audience is searching the web first. You want to be there when they do. Contact Empire for more information on where and who you can advertise with and how to get started. |
