Marketing Budgets Being Trimmed

According to an article on Bloomberg.com, for the second consecutive quarter, U.S. companies are spending less on advertising.

As a web design company, we try to stay up-to-date with advertising topics because of the Search Engine Marketing connection. So, reading the article, I noticed some interesting figures presented dealing with the advertising market decline:

• Advertising on network television dropped 3.6 percent
• Newspaper advertising fell 5.8 percent
• Radio ad spending dropped 2.7 percent

But, not all the news was bad. The part of articles like this that always catches my eye is the part that deals with Internet advertising:

• Money spent on Internet display ads rose 18 percent

It seems that the average advertiser is slowly becoming more and more aware of the power of the Internet. Think about it, when you place an ad in a newspaper, you have no guarantee that one single person will even see your ad. The best “guarantee” that a newspaper can give you is when they tell you how large their circulation is. But all that really means is that they will print your ad that many times, not that your ad will be seen that many times.

However, when you advertise on a web site, the owner of that site can (and should) provide you will all kinds of metrics showing how many times that site is viewed each month (unique visitors), where those visitors are coming from (tracked by IP addresses) and even what terms they typed into the Search Engine before arriving at that particular web site. How many times were last month’s advertisers visited? How many times were each of those ads displayed? The data stream goes on and on.

Don’t misunderstand, I still think there is a place for the traditional newspaper / radio / tv advertising. There are plenty of people that still prefer to thumb through the newspaper and almost everyone watches tv and listens to the radio. The point that I am stating is that Internet advertising can usually offer a better ROI.

So, if your advertising budget is tightening, try looking into Internet advertising on a web site that caters to your type of client. Most web sites offer ad placement for a very nominal fee on a month-to-month basis.

Of course, if you would like some information on how you can advertise on our technology blog, we have all the details for you to help you determine if it is a good fit for you.