Online advertising
The best results, according to van Wyck, come from online advertising. -If you are online, it's simply easier to get people who are already online to come to a Web site," he purports.
However, van Wyck says the results he has found from Web banners have been mixed. -We had some success and some failures with banners. They work well if you have highly targeted content and the ads and content fit well together.
Hot House has done a lot of affiliate arrangements where it shared revenue with people, based on the traffic that they bring to the Web site and that has worked well. van Wyck attributes this success to the fact that it is cheap and it is paying for success. -We can track the people who have been directed to us from another site and can calculate the revenue they generate.
-If you look at the success of e-Bay in the United States (which operates a similar cross linking and revenue sharing scheme) there is no question that their success has largely been driven by their online campaign. They are everywhere."
However, Weber Shandwick's Robles does not agree that online advertising is the utlimate answer. -Loyalty programs may work but again it depends on the audience."
Earlier this year a new Web promotion organisation called clixGalore.com was launched in Australia. clixGalore provides affiliate programs to merchants wishing to build and promote their Web site and e-business, or affiliates wishing to earn income by displaying merchant advertisements.
ClixGalore general manager, Chris Brooks, says affiliate networks were useful in making an organisation's Web presence known by expanding its partnerships with other businesses on the Internet.
-As a merchant you can build your own pay-per-click, pay-per-lead, or pay-per-sale affiliate program and use graphic or text advertisements to promote your Web sites product or services.
Affiliates then join your program and display your advertisements on their Web sites, sending customers and traffic back to your site."
He says online marketing and sale statistics are available so clicks, impressions and sales can be tracked and merchants had total control over the rate paid for each click, sale or lead.
Alternatively they can join one of the programs and earn money by hosting other merchants' ads on their site.
The company has put security measures in place to prevent fraud by users attempting to enter clixGalore code directly into a browser so clicks were recorded without visiting the site.
Brooks says the company is able to check that the click-through has actually been submitted via the affiliates web site. -If a click-through is submitted via a non-approved route the attempt is logged as a fraud attempt and we will pursue repeated fraud attempts."
Getting the right mix
For some, it's not a matter of deciding which one approach to take to promoting their Web site, it's getting a mix of a number of different options.
Michael Young, group head of marketing for the Perpetual investment group has used this approach. When Perpetual updated its perpetualinvestments.com.au Web site, adding new customer services, it used a combination of print and online advertising to get the message across.
-We were providing an additional service to our 120,000 investors through the site," he says. -The first step was to highlight the changes on the site itself. The people who normally used the site were going to quickly realise we had made a change or added something to it because we promoted it on the front page.
-The rest of the investors were targeted with a promotion via our newsletter, telling them what the new services were and how to register online for them."
Young believes that in the finance industry the Internet is looked upon as an enabler, rather than as an acquisition tool. He thinks this is because people tended to go to fund managers because of their brand or because they got third party endorsement. -No one will tend to go to your site just because you have great features on it," he says. -However, they may go there seeking information.
-We use the URL on a lot of our advertising and on our direct response advertising we use the site by directing people to different pages so we can then track them. We find that about half our visitors are responding to press advertising but they tend to be people who are less committed so the leads are not as warm. They find the mechanism of being online and checking out the site is a lot easier than picking up the phone and talking to someone, filling out a coupon, or even sending an e-mail. However, they tend to be people who have a quick look, decide whether they like it or not and then move on. So while more people respond the leads are of less quality."
