The evolution of interactive marketing can only help you if you know what to look for.

Search Engine Marketing

Look at paid search, for example. It definitely has changed over the last 8 years. Paid search started life as an open field, similar to the early days of the Web. It was cheap, and there wasn’t a lot of competition.

Now, it’s not quite as cheap, and there can be very stiff competition.

Today, a full-blown non-geotargeted AdWords campaign should be viewed as launching a true national ad campaign. If you’re having trouble justifying the price, this is a pretty simple way to explain it. Unfortunately, many people finally coming into paid search still believe it is dirt cheap. But it is inexpensive when considering the other national outlets such as TV, print, traditional direct marketing, etc.

This results in reflection. Do you really need or want a national ad campaign? Can you truly service the remote corners of this great nation plus support the varying time zones?

Most often than not, once these expectations are managed, your come to find that fewer raw impressions are fine, a geo-targeted campaign is wise, and you will be able to better provide service to your customer base by making sure you are not over-extending your reach.

Basically, just because you CAN run a national paid search campaign doesn’t mean you necessarily SHOULD.

So what other options are there?

Display Advertising

It’s not just banner buys on local websites anymore. If you truly know your audience (you do, right?), you can place a buy against specific audience clusters, and pit them against each other or against control groups, individual websites be damned. Because, end of the day, you’re trying to reach a specific person, and really shouldn’t be caring about a specific website.

But how does this work? It’s the beauty of ad networks, which are collections of thousands of websites. This flexibility of inventory not only lets you pick audiences, but also gives you the types of buying power that you would never be able to achieve by buying direct from individual sites.

Social Media Advertising

Along the same lines as cherry picking audiences on ad networks, we can now do the same through sites like Facebook and MySpace. It’s this granularity that makes creating the ads fun. Say, for instance, you want to reach female college grads that live in Arizona and attended Penn State. We can easily do that through targeted social media ads.

Amazing Possibilities

The possibilities are almost endless. Interactive marketing truly is the Swiss Army knife of a modern marketing communications strategy.

… Let Us Help You Look Beyond Your Traditional Marketing Programs