Small business owners often ask me which internet marketing techniques work best. The answer is, “it depends on your audience.” Knowing your target audience and testing to see which techniques they respond to should be your #1 priority in your internet marketing plan.
With that said, MarketingSherpa did a survey recently with these results:
BEST internet marketing results:
- 49% of survey respondents said “paid search ads”
- 47% said their own in-house mailing list
- 45% said search engine optimization (SEO)
WORST results:
- 56% said rented mailing lists gave them the WORST results
- 45% said pop-ups and pop-unders
MarketingSherpa.com is a wealth of information, especially surveys and studies. Here are some good reports. If you sign up for their mailing list, you get most of their reports and articles for free (if you access them within a week of the email broadcast; after that, there is a fee):
Hotel Alert: Have You Heard of “Guest Gouging?”
Hi. Wanted to thank you for this site; very useful. I’m a marketing consultant and have found that being onsite with clients makes a huge difference from a customer service and relationship building perspective. It’s not always possible, of course, but I did just find a great tool other readers might benefit from, a videoconferencing/collaboration service that’s cheap and easy. Next best thing to being there and a HUGE difference in personalizing presentations, brainstorming sessions, etc. Except I can’t work in sweats on those days:).
KnowledgeNetworks at http://poundi.com/knowledgeltd.com/
Hi, great site. I’ve been doing internet marketing for years now and all I can say that the internet is changing. With youtube and the advent of new technology I find that the best way to market is utilizing free methods. I specialize in this and is definitely the way to go. i guess this would be under SEO which is practically free. Also web 2.0 marketing is the new wave of marketing and it’s all free!
To learn more about my techniques you can visit my site:
http://littleguynetworkhomebusiness.blogspot.com.
perfect…
I think that the general concept of internet marketing popularity (according to the survey data you posted) is correct; however, different markets experience different results. I’m looking for a fairly discrete market on the web and in general, SEO is probably the only thing that helps.