Many businesses can get stuck in old habits and methods and many are almost afraid of trying new advertising and marketing media.  Many small to medium sized businesses are happy to spend vast amounts of their marketing budget on direct mail, television and magazine and newspaper advertisements with often no idea of how effective they are.  The truth about these sort of advertisements are that yes they can work but there are a number of limiting factors.  

You can spend vast amounts on a TV or magazine advert and find that it has a negative impact on your business because the audience didn’t react in a positive way towards your message.   The other thing is how can you measure the effectiveness of the advertising.  A magazine can say they have 500,000 readers a week but there is no guarantee that those readers are going to see your quarter page advert.  A direct mail campaign may deliver your flyer to around 80,000 homes but how many of those flyers will make it any further than the bin?  There is no real way to measure the effectiveness of your advert.

With search engine optimisation and PPC you are bringing your product to the customer rather than trying to bring the customers to you.  What I mean by that is there is already a demand for the product or service you’re offering and you are simply bringing your product to the customers attention by putting it in front of them.  In theory it should be easy to sell your product or service.

The other advantage of SEO and pay per click is that you can see exactly how many people have come through your online advertising, if it converted to a sale and at what point they left your site.  You can even see which key phrases your website was found for and whether the PPC or organic SERPs brought in the customer.  All of these things can not only show how effective your SEO and PPC have been they also allow you to improve your advertising.

You may have found that you are getting a lot of people clicking on your sponsored links but it is not resulting in sales.  This could be for a number of reasons either your advert isn’t descriptive enough or your prices are higher than the potential customers expectations.  This means you can perform split testing and try different adverts perhaps one with a price in would detract those customers before they click on your link saving your advertising budget.

The truth of the matter is that the best way is to combine a number of marketing techniques together as this will help build brand awareness.  That said any business that is looking to trade online would be foolish to not use SEO and PPC to promote their website online. 

We all know that to make the most of your search engine optimisation you need to combine it with other forms of marketing both online and offline.  Proof of this can be seen simply by visiting Google.  You will often find that some companies appear in both the organic listings and the sponsored links and there is a very good reason for this.  People react differently to things online, where some people may not trust the sponsored links and only use the organic listings some people may just use the sponsored links.

Royal Mail recently conducted a survey among consumers to find out how they react to direct mail.  Their findings suggested that direct mail can boost marketing campaigns when they are combined with SEO.  The reason for this is because the more a consumer sees a product or brand in different areas of their life the more they begin to trust it.  This is vital for major brands with huge marketing budgets which is why they are everywhere but this might not be the case for small to medium sized businesses that have to be more strategic with their marketing budget.  The best solution is to ensure you have a good search engine optimisation and PPC campaign, as people tend to search online to find out about companies and products and then to fit in offline marketing where possible.