Online Marketing

Online marketing can be less expensive and more effective and accountable than traditional methods - Rebecca Spicer explores the benefits for SMEs, and the myriad options for getting the best results from e-marketing campaigns.

Perhaps the most telling comment that came from research for this article was, “No-one can afford to brochure drop all of Australia”. Glenn Nicholas, co-director of online marketing agency PublicityShip, couldn’t have summed it up better for Australian SMEs who are not part of a big chain.

But the internet has opened the way for SMEs to broaden marketing strategies, with new tools appearing every other day. They can now market on a more level playing field with big business, especially when looking to expand nationally, even globally.

Importantly, e-marketing isn’t just for those with an e-commerce-enabled (or transactional) website. At the simplest level, online marketing might only involve setting up an information-based website to provide potential stakeholders with instantaneous access to a ‘brochure’ about your business.

Often when you first hear about a product or service you’re interested in, you head to the business’ website. Chances are people are doing this when it comes to your business, too.

On a deeper level, getting people to find out more about your business doesn’t have to be by chance. The internet now provides a range of tools to get your business in front of new and potential customers on a regular basis. “In the current market, online marketing is about realising new opportunities and taking advantage of them,” says Nicholas.

In terms of straight online advertising, display advertising is one method, whereby businesses find partner or affiliate websites and place an advertisement on them, called banner ads. Essentially you’re buying space on their website to draw attention to your business.

The advantage of display ads over, say, a newspaper advertisement is their measurability. Click-through results are readily available in real time, to gauge the success of a campaign.

Display ads tend to be a part of your short-term marketing strategy, and the costs will vary depending on the site you’re advertising on. And unless you’re experienced in web design, you’ll most likely need to engage an advertising agency to design the ad for you.

If your goal is to get more people to visit your website, then a good starting point is through keyword analysis, says Nicholas. That is, analysing what keywords your customers would be using to search for your business online. “Your customers give you a big clue about what they’re interested in by what they’re searching for online,” he explains.

He uses the example of a business in the real estate market: “If you’re looking to take your services out to a national market, you can probably position yourself as a property expert, or a real estate expert, and you’d ask, what would be the difference? If you look at it instinctively, you might make your choice based on your own perception of what people are after and what that means. But if you did keyword analysis and realised that for the top 40 searches that people are actually doing on the internet, ‘real estate’ gets used 14 times more than ‘property’. Now, what difference would that make to your publicity campaign, your marketing, and your whole positioning?”

While there are tools businesses can use to do this themselves, using the expertise of a search engine optimisation (SEO) specialist can be beneficial, adds Nicholas. SEO is all about optimising your website, so when potential customers input keywords relevant to your business into a search engine (such as Google), your website will rank highly in the search results for those keywords. And note, these are the organic listings, not those paid listings that appear at the very top or down the right hand side of the screen, which we’ll address later.

According to Michael Rom, director of web design and SEO specialists Net Starter, your website developer or designer can do a few things to help the cause, but there are two main things the end user can do: get a lot of quality content on your site, and get a lot of quality inbound links. A good starting point when looking for other sites to link with is industry associations, suppliers, trade contacts, and exhibition directories.