Online Marketing Wiltshire

We have looked at the possibility of producing and marketing a new product or service off line, or what is sometimes called the real world, the barrier to entry with many of the off line solutions is often cost, to promote a new product or tell people about your new service is expensive if you are going to do it through the media.

A local newspaper advertisement that is just a quarter of a page in size and will only run for one night will cost upwards of £700, you can get discounts if you agree to long term commitments or get an advertisement free if you place 3 and things like this but for a campaign to have true impact you need to keep an advertisement running for weeks if not months and the costs very quickly get in to the thousands of pounds.

These figures can be multiplied by a factor of 10 if you are looking for national coverage and if you want your advertisement shown on television then a budget in the tens of thousands of pounds is required, not very realistic for a small company.

However there is some hope, with the internet you can announce your new service or product to a targeted audience at a very low price, often free.

Some ways of achieving this are to write a blog post and post it on your companies blog, others can then pick it up and the buzz begins, you can use social media such as twitter or face book and get the word out, write a press release and tell the world.

All these methods are free and easy to do, if you have a website you should look into search engine optimisation to get your site found in the search engines.

In the next part of this blog we will be looking at the audience you can attract online.

Online marketing is an extension of traditional forms of marketing, the only real difference between online marketing and real world marketing is that online marketing is done as the name suggests on the Internet.

Marketing your goods or services on the Internet rather than or in addition to off line or traditional marketing has several advantages, these would include, but not be limited to:

• Cost
• Audience
• Speed

With traditional marketing you would need to contact news papers magazines printers, PR companies etc to get word of your latest service out to the people in your area or country that you do business in, if your budget was large enough you could go for a global launch, however this took a lot of planning and was hughley expensive, times and technology have changes and it is now possible to get just as much impact without spending a penny.

Please read part 2 of this blog post when we discuss the cost of an online marketing strategy and how you can attract a global audience with a few minutes work at no cost.