The Changing Face of Marketing: How The World Wide Web Has Transformed How Businesses Prepare Their Publicity Strategies
Friday, September 3rd, 2010Among the greatest challenges confronting a business, in particular a startup, is making the market know of its existence. It is no good being the most expert workman in your district, or producing the finest merchandise in your line of business, if the public doesn’t know this. Promotion and marketing are necessary. Indeed, enormous quantities of money are disbursed every year on these areas. There are established types of advertising exemplified by newspaper ads, of course. Nonetheless at the current time with the growth of Internet business, there exist online jobs committed to expanding a company’s Internet profile, and it is possible to work from home instead of a normal office, to do this.
A friend of mine once set up an antiques shop. He was an experienced floor manager, and produced a beautifully designed shop layout with many kinds of fascinating antiques, at affordable prices. Unfortunately this guy simply didn’t see the necessity to make known the shop’s attractions. He just thought ads were too expensive, so he didn’t bother to start a successful advertising campaign. The salesroom ultimately failed, as a result of poor sales. One customer who did find the shop just before it shut, mentioned that he lived just half a mile away and he had not even known of the shop’s existence.
Conventional newspaper advertising is in decline. There is the increasingly important field of Internet business in which businesses publicize their merchandise via professionally developed websites. Website designers often work from home in online jobs employing Internet technologies to produce stylish websites for businesses. Internet advertising is another growing field of business. Many Internet adverts can be extremely irritating because they materialize as ‘popups’ when when you select a hyperlink, even if the advert has no relevance to the link and you are not in the least interested in what the advert is attempting to sell.
And this is the paradox. When people are seeking traditional adverts, they find them in the relevant pages of a local or national paper or the Yellow Pages. There doesn’t exist a Web based equivalent for such ads, so how do people find what they want? They go to search engines, inputting a search term that indicates what they are seeking, and finding out what the engine says could be relevant to them. However since there exist a wide range of websites that may be related to the keyword, how can a search engine judge which sites it should rank most highly?
This is where another group of online jobs has exists, optimizing websites to ensure they are stronger candidates to be ranked on page one of a Web search, and thus have more people visiting the sites. In Internet business, the website is effectively the advert, and rather than ads coming to people as in a commercial break on TV, customers come to the adverts via the search engines. This is why it is possible for those with the expertise to work from home boosting search engine rankings.
From a business viewpoint, this technique has an important benefit. An advert, wherever it it is shown, must be paid for up front, whether it brings in a huge amount of new business or makes no perceptible difference. On the other hand, how well a website is optimized can only be ascertained by where it appears in the search engine rankings. Clients only need to pay the optimizing specialists, if they manage to promote the business’s website onto page 1 of the results. Furthermore it is probable that those interested enough to input a relevant search phrase will look at the initial handful of websites in the search results and do business there.
The world of advertising has been revolutionized by the World Wide Web, yet a number of basics remain. Keeping people informed about your products is an essential part of Internet business no less than for any other field of enterprise.