Different Markets, Different Marketing Channels

In our years of experience doing Internet marketing for both small and large companies, we've learned a thing or two about the effectiveness of online marketing channels. As I've discussed in other blog posts, no one channel works in all markets. Finding the best channel for a particular product or service, therefore, is key to online marketing success. So, in this blog post I'd like to take a look at the most common online marketing channels and what types of business they are effective for.

*AdWords
Google being the dominant shareholder in the realm of PPC advertising, AdWord is one of the most effective marketing channels. We've found that AdWords delivers the best ROAS for

1. Larger, well-known brands
2. Businesses with a concrete, always in high demand, product
3. Niche markets that have moderate to high demand and vert low competition

*Organic SEO
Organic SEO is the art of prmoting websites to top positions in "natural" or "regular" (the uninfluenceable") search results. But with the major SEs frequent tweaking and changing of the algorithms which sort and rank these results, organic search engine optimization gets more and more complex as the Web develops. Add to that the inclusion of socal media search results (i.e., "real time search"), personalized search results, and universal search results, and the task is even harder.

We've found that organic SEO works best for

1.small, new websites with a hyperlocal market (e.g., a piano teacher in Bedminster, NJ)
2. Businesses with small, relatively unknown brand names
3. Businesses with products/services in geos that aren't major DMAs

*Social Media
Social media sites like Twitter and Facebook represent paradoxes for the online marketer. We've found that Twitter, for example, can work wonders for customer service but is not so reliable for increasing sales when compared with the amount of labor that is required. And with Facebook, too much promoting can get your business fan page banned. While these media can generate sales, it is not in a predictable pattern, making ROI difficult t measure. Again, social media marketing works best for large, well known brands, and not so well at all for small, unknown brands. Thus it appears that, with social media, the brand drives the engagement, not the other way around. I still feel that there is a lot more hype than substance in discussions about social media marketing.

*Google Local Business
What is true for organic SEO is largely true for Google Local. Businesses in a city that is not a major DMA and which do not have tons of competition fare the best in Google Local rankings.

*Yahoo/Bing PPC
TBD. We have not seen much effectiveness in either of these two major ad programs. However, more rigorous testing is in order.