According to a report by State ofInbound, when companies were asked what their top marketing challenges were, 63% responded “generating traffic and leads”.
These days, a few ads in your local paper or a giant billboard in the middle of the city won’t bring in tons of business. Do they work? Of course, but are they good enough? No, not in a world based online.
But don’t worry! Online marketing is only a few clicks away, and sure, while online marketing tends to fall on the expensive side, the potential traffic you’ll garner in the long-term outweighs the short-term cons.
Without further ado, let’s jump into the different types of online marketing you can use to generate site traffic!
Ad Campaigns
Hiring a third-party to run an ad campaign for your company may be expensive, but it is worth it. After all, good marketing is a finely-tuned art, so why not hire a few artists to do most of the work?
Similar to a political campaign, an ad campaign focuses on targeting specific areas of the Internet–such as social media–to bring awareness to the business or service being advertised. Of course, there are variations of ad campaigns. For example, one ad campaign may just focus on promoting tweets and Instagram posts, whereas a more extreme campaign will have users promote the business under the guise of a regular user–not a promoter.
Ad campaigns are currently the best form of online marketing, especially today, where many users make a living as “social media influencers”, promoting products as part of a campaign.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
Ads remain an annoying, yet necessary part of business; as a regular user, you want nothing more than all those ads to go away, but as a business owner? The more ads, the better!
And if you’re going to be posting ads all over the place, you might as well earn some money during the process; with PPC, this is exactly what happens.
Many websites user “pay-per-click” ads to increase revenue, as all that needs to be done is for a user to click on the ad. Once clicked, a small amount of money (typically a cent or more) is earned by the host of the ad, whether it’s a search engine or your business.
Cold Marketing
Tried-and-true, the cold marketing technique remains a viable–if not uncomfortable–form of marketing.
If you’re already running a business or work in marketing, you probably know what I’m talking about: calling, emailing or @’ing another business or site.
I’ve never met anyone who likes cold calling or sending cold email after cold email, but you do what you got to do. Plus, while most attempts will result in failure, there’s a lot of potential to rope in a good amount of business.
Affiliates
Remember the social media influencers I mentioned earlier? Well to you, they’re potential affiliates–partner to advertise your service.
Cheaper than a whole ad campaign, paying an affiliate who has tons of influence over their fanbase can act as a virtual goldmine, bringing in loads of business through one post. However, this traffic may only be temporary as the affiliate moves on to different products–unless you keep paying, however.
Conclusion
Whether you’re a startup business trying to make it in the cold world of finance or an established security company attempting to give out coupons to your VPN software, online marketing plays an essential role in long-term success, though I think that’s obvious.
Sure, some people are annoyed by the mere presence of advertisements, and yeah, some don’t click on advertisements at all, but marketing is a slow-paced game with long-term benefits. As long as you play the game right, you’ll come out a bit more of a winner than you were before, and one day, you may even get the gold. Real gold, n…not Reddit gold. Unfortunately, Reddit will not sponsor me as an affiliate. Maybe one day…
