The pitch: More than one way to market online

By NICHOLAS TEE

As with any business, if a website is to reach its target market it must be marketed effectively.

Yet while most companies proudly hand out new business cards with the new website address displayed, and others resort to adding their new website address to the bottom of their magazine advertising, the fact remains that online advertising is just as important, if not more so, than traditional offline options.

Certainly offline advertising has its place, but until the average consumer develops the habit of reading their latest edition of Woman's Weekly or local newspaper while using the internet, offline advertising has a limited effectiveness.

After all, isn't the very reason we advertise in a magazine because we want to catch the attention of the consumer pursuing their interest, or seeking information? For most people who are comfortable shopping online, the internet is one of their interests, and they certainly use it in pursuit of information.

Yet few New Zealand businesses advertise and market themselves online - and those that do use strategies proved to be too expensive and ineffective in countries such as the US and UK three or four years ago.

So what are the online marketing options?

Of course, the first options that springs to mind are the search engines. Certainly important, but search engine traffic is reactive advertising.

Of greater importance is proactive marketing - where strategically placed advertising is positioned to create customer awareness and drive consumer demand.

In the early days of the internet, busy websites offered advertising space using a format similar to the traditional media channels, where advertising appeared during a specific period at a specific cost. And things were great until the advertiser started to question the results versus the cost.

In 95 per cent of cases, the only winner was the website providing the advertising space and the advertiser quickly found this format to be ineffective.

And so affiliate marketing was born, a form of purely performance-based online advertising where the merchant was able to benefit from mass-market advertising but with costs being directly related to the success of the campaign - and, more importantly, sales.

Since that time, some of the largest companies in the world have embraced affiliate marketing as their primary online marketing tool. And with justification. Because it works.

The simple fact is that an affiliate marketing strategy creates a win-win situation for both the merchant and the third-party website providing the advertising space by ensuring that the merchant can reduce customer acquisition costs while the third-party website responsible for producing the customers receives a commission on each sale or lead.

And by using the services of a professional affiliate marketing company the whole procedure is fully automated without the need for installing special software or committing valuable company resources to tracking those sales and commission payments.

While affiliate marketing has worked magnificently for product-based sales companies such as Amazon and Dell Computers, we also now see the likes of the big credit card companies, insurance companies, banks and other service providers using affiliate marketing to build brand awareness and develop leads for their services.


* nick@nz-internet

* Nicholas Tee is managing director of specialist e-commerce marketing consultancy Access Traffic NZ

* The Pitch is a forum for those working in advertising, marketing, public relations and communications. We welcome lively and topical 500-word contributions. Contact marketing writer Simon Hendery: * Email Simon Hendery


* The Pitch is a forum for those working in advertising, marketing, public relations and communications. We welcome lively and topical 500-word contributions.
Email The Pitch.