Advertising Agency

Your full service ad agency might explain to you a handful of social media tactics that they will claim you should use employ as a strategy. However, its usually more of a bunch of tactics that they want to be paid for rather than a strategy.

But it should always come back to answering why you should be doing this.

Social media strategies involve much more than just putting the accounts together. The members of social media communities want valuable and quality content. If you have that, you will be a trusted source of information for your service/product.

So what exactly does a social media strategy involve? Here are some simple questions you should consider before wildly deploying social media marketing tactics.

• Answer the Question of "Why?": Your social media strategy should fully tell you why you're using a particular tactic. Is it because your audience is there and interacting already? Is it because the potential for branding and exposure is there?
• How to Deploy a Strategy: How do you gain respect in social media? Do you go in guns blazing, or do you sit back and get a feel for what you're about to embark on? Is it an approach of asking questions first and then offering advice? Do you want to ask for submissions from the audience or start by writing valuable content? Your strategy should fully answer these questions before you start.
• Defining Your Goals and Measuring Analytics: How do you know your efforts are doing anything? What is your company expecting as a return on your time and resources spent on your marketing efforts in social media? If there isn't a clear set of goals to be measured for your efforts, how can you justify your tactics? Do you have clear ROI for your social media efforts?
• When to Should You Re-evaluate?: Some New Jersey marketing companies sometimes forget to define when they should re-evaluate their efforts. But what if something isn't working, and you aren't meeting your goals? What if something else is working really well? Set points in your strategy for re-evaluation. Remember, nothing is ever set in stone when it comes to social media marketing.

It's very common to create a MySpace account or Facebook fan page because it's free, easy, and everyone else is doing it. While New Jersey marketing companies should secure accounts on social media sites for their clients or brand names, they shouldn't just devote massive amounts of time to one particular social media marketing tactic just because of the above three reasons.

Implementing social media marketing tactics for any reason without a good strategy in place will ultimately lead to confusion and disappointment in your efforts in the social media game.

If any full service ad agency, public relations agency, or search marketing firm comes to you and says that you need a Facebook fan page without any reason other than that it's new, you need it, and they know how to do it for you, then you might want to stop and ask yourself why you're using that advertising agency.

Comcast will acquire a 51% interest in NBC Universal from General Electric in a deal valued at $30 billion.

As part of the deal, the French media company Vivendi will sell its 20% stake for $5.8 billion, leaving GE with a 49% stake.

This deal creates a massive media giant with assets spanning broadcast, cable advertising, telephone, internet, and movie and television advertising, as well as theme parks. NBC, the network in the middle of it all, will be just a small part of it.

NBCU's cable presence will be much more prominent with the addition of Comcast's Versus, the Golf Channel and E! Entertainment to its portfolio, which includes CNBC, MSNBC, USA, Bravo and SyFy.

However, integrating it all while winning regulatory approval could take well over a year.

What it will mean for media buyers and any full service ad agency is hard to say at this point. The upside for marketing companies is the ability to place clients across a wider range of media outlets. However, such deals are difficult to execute, and media buyers have long turned away from them.

The downside for media buyers is that consolidation typically leads to higher prices.

But Wall Street analysts have favored the deal, believing Comcast is far better suited to run an entertainment company than GE.

Jeff Zucker will remain chief executive of NBCU, reporting to Comcast CEO Steve Burke, but at some point Zucker will likely be replaced. Zucker has survived under GE but his track record as a CEO has not been up to par. He's been widely criticized for managing for the bottom line and blamed in particular for NBC's tumble to 4th place in the ratings.

Presumably an early goal for Comcast will be to invest dollars and talent in making NBC the flagship TV property once again.

In its venture to convince advertisers and advertising agencies to buy television advertising time through its online auction-based Google TV Ads platform, Google has made a deal with TiVo giving media buyers access to digital set-top data generated by subscribers of TiVo. This deal is the most recent move by Google to gain a following among mainstream marketers and advertising agencies for its television advertising platform. The platfrom has gotten alot of popular buzz but it has failed to gain any critical mass because of its limited access to quality television advertising inventory.

Up to now, Google TV Ads has plans to sell local advertising on DISH Network, and national TV ads on a handful of mostly low-rated or emerging cable TV networks.

Google is using the deal with TiVo to leverage their enhanced data to make the Google TV Ads platform more attractive to advertisers, and as a result, more appealing to big TV networks to begin using to sell their television advertising time.

Google TV Ads main data source is the digital set-top boxes of DISH Network subscribers, and some small digital cable TV systems that have partnered up with Google. Google subsequently enhanced those TV audience data streams by licensing demographic TV audience information from Nielsen Co., and more recently by licensing geo-demographic analytics data from Nielsen's PRIZM system.

The new deal with TiVo gains access to second-by-second DVR viewing data, which will give Google TV Ads advertisers insights about household-level advertising impressions generated by their buys, but it does not include any of the enhanced analytics generated by TiVo's StopWatch service, which is not covered by this deal.

Google hasn't disclosed how much television advertising is actually being processed through its platform, but the system is believed to be popular mainly with direct response and "long tail" advertisers and advertising agencies, and among bigger advertising agencies using it primarily to test and gain insights about TV audience exposure via the system, which competes with Microsoft's NAVIC, and Spot Runner's Malibu platforms. The cable TV industry's Canoe Ventures also is seen as a potential competitor or collaborator with Google TV Ads, but its long-term market play still remains unclear in the minds of many TV buyers and sellers.

Meanwhile, the amalgamation of TV audience data streams and analytics tools being assembled by Google TV Ads has been both intellectually attractive to Madison Avenue, as well as confusing, as was evident during a series of presentations made by various data suppliers and end-users during a TV audience measurement summit held by Google earlier this month.

During one of those presentations, Nielsen Senior Vice President-Insights, Analysis and Policy Pat McDonough, noted there still are a number of problems with the kind of set-top data being used by Google TV Ads, including the fact that it's difficult to know when people are actually sitting in front of their TV sets when the set-top devices are on and tuned to a channel. According to Nielsen's estimates, 10% of digital set-top devices "never get turned off," and 30% are on for 24-hours in any given day. While methods have been developed for editing the digital set-top data to factor out the non-viewing portion of their tuning, the real value is in reporting the "long tail" of the TV universe - the part not measured by Nielsen's traditional TV methods.

During another presentation by the full service ad agency Karlen Williams Graybill Advertising, which showcased the results of an actual TV buy made earlier this year for the Act and Gold Bond Ultimate brands across eight cable TV networks, comparing both Google TV Ads and Nielsen's conventional TV ratings samples, the agency concluded that there were no "statistically significant" differences, and that, "There is no perfect rating methodology."

Source:  MediaPost News

The advertising agency of the future will have to adapt to the changing ways of the business world.  Instead of distinguishing themselves between specific disciplines, such as just a public relations agency, or just a direct mail advertiser, or just an outdoor advertising agency, or billboard advertising agency to get even more specific, advertising agencies of the future will have to broaden their horizons. They will have to become full on all-solutions marketing companies. A recent post on a great blog called Actionable Insights by Covario explains in full detail why a simple advertising agency may be a thing of the past. In the future, a marketing solutions company will be the answer to a business's problems.

You can read the full blog entry here.

Sports radio ratings aren’t as high as many people thought.

For big games, ratings shoot way up. But there are only a handfull of big games in any season. For other games, ratings drop way down.

As a result, the radio advertising rates that stations used to get for their live sports coverage have gone down significantly, by about 20% to 30%. Industry sources reveal that some stations radio advertising rates have dropped even more than that.

Some people think that the more accurate the ratings data is, the better it will be for everybody, even if it means stations having to reduce their radio advertising rates.

One such person is Bob Snyder, founder of Beason Broadcast Partners, which consults with sports radio stations and sports franchises on ad sales. He thinks that the more reliable ratings data serves to build credibility with New Jersey marketing companies, advertisers, and retail advertising agencies, making sports play-by-play broadcasts that much more attractive for advertising.

However, others think that the numbers don’t tell the whole story when it comes to play-by-play sports.

Tim McCarthy, senior vice president of radio at ESPN, says that overworked media buyers, who face tons of pressure from clients to get the best deal, only look at the numbers and without taking into account the unique, passionate audience that radio broadcasts deliver.

“What’s the value of a Yankees/Red Sox game or a Bears/Packers game? These are rivalries that have packed arenas for years. They have value. To say no one cares is not true.”

The problem is that radio stations are seeing less radio advertising revenue from broadcasting rights they agreed to pay big dollars for before the more accurate ratings data was released.

Those deals, since they are no longer profitable for the radio station, create a problem for the station's bottom line. However they are still valuable because they set in place a station's position in the market.

Now is the time to invest in radio advertising since the rates have become incredibly low. You can get more air time and reach more people with the same amount of investment, thereby drastically increasing your ROI.

What do you want your online New Jersey marketing campaign to accomplish for you? Are there any reasons why you would not want your pages to be found for your targeted keyword phrases on page 1?

Here are 3 reasons as to why that may be the case.

Is there intent for actual commerce?

Let's say you are the first result.

You should be asking yourself, what is the intent of this keyword phrase? Do the words contained in the keyword phrase give any indication of someone getting ready to spend money on a product/service that you offer?

For example, consider three keyword phrases we would use: Britain O'Connor, co-op advertising, and automotive marketing ideas. The latter 2 phrases give an indication of someone who is getting ready to spend money. The first phrase does not.

If you are targeting a keyword phrase that has questionable intention, there really shouldn't be any reason to be found on page 1. It would be better to target more appropriate phrases instead.

If there's no intent for actual commerce then that keyword phrase isn't helping your online New Jersey marketing efforts.

Traffic Really Matters

If you can have a first page result in position 4, or a second page result in position 12, which would you choose? Is this an obvious choice?

What if the first page choice has 3,300 monthly search queries for its keyword, but the second page choice has 22,200 monthly search queries for its keyword.

Would you still believe that the best choice in this example is the first page result?

According to numbers from Aaron Wall's site, approximately 6% of search users will click on the number 4 result in Google. That's 198 visitors in a month.

And over 1% will click on the number 12 search result. That's 222 visitors per month.

The second choice is now the obvious choice. The higher traffic volume will result in a higher percentage of online conversions.

Smart Searchers Bring Value

The people that click the first result in the SERPs are more often that not less serious than people who go through the first few results or who continue searching onto the second page.

There is something to be said about avoiding people who almost randomly click the first result and who may have impulse control issues.

These may not be the best potential clients for your products/services. For an automotive ad agency, retail advertising agency, or public relations agency like us, we like our clients to be a bit more informed so we can be on the same page when it comes to performance. The searchers who don't just click on the first result but read through a few are usually the more informed people.

A second page result could bring you more serious potential customers, people who are more likely to actually read your website content, understand your products/services better, and be more likely to become a traffic conversion.

Paris Hilton has threatened legal action against a billboard advertising company who suggested that she was 'vacant'.

A New Zealand company plastered her face across a roadside billboard advertising free billboard space.

Paris Hilton is threatening to sue the company, Media5, over the photo of her used to promote free billboard advertising space, with the suggestion that she is vacant.

Her manager, Jamie Freed, claims the company does not have permission to use the picture and insisted to local media that the star plans to settle the matter in court.

Spokesperson for Media5, Adam McGregor described the advert as 'a bit of fun'.

Paris has a proven ability to laugh at herself,' he said. 'We assume that the agency has taken care of the rights to the image of Paris, but we will ask the question. We're not trying to offend anyone.'

He said that if Hilton's lawyers asked for her image to be removed from the billboard, the company would probably oblige.

Earlier this year, Woody Allen received £3million in damages for the unauthorized use of his image in a billboard advertising campaign for clothing giant American Apparel.

The economy is springing back into action, and as such, this is your opportunity to position your business as THE place to go to for your product/service. By expanding your advertising budget, as the now growing economy will enable you, you can add value that will result in increased reach and frequency. Both of these are essential to getting more business and increasing profits. In the next couple of posts, I will explain how you can add value to your advertising campaign so that your ad dollars aren't wasted.

The first thing to remember is that leads are much more important than branding right now. When revamping your ad campaign, or starting a new business, generating new leads is key, even if your public relations agency or full service ad agency tells you different.

Of course branding will help to create a strong identity, and a fancy logo can help achieve that. But nothing creates a stronger identity than giving the best products/services to alot of consumers. So, if your a retailer, make sure that your retail advertising agency is spending more time at generating leads than it is at branding. Thus, it's critical that your ads can be responded to, so have a call-to-action, whether it's a "call us" or a "click here".

Your business needs to be the provider of sought after products/services, especially for people actively looking for lower-cost and better products/services. You need to be able to find a full service ad agency that can deliver your message to consumers. I went over how to find the best ad agency for you in an older post.

Next time, I will go over negotiating and leveraging.

According to a new study, mobile marketing budgets are going to increase dramatically over the next year. 31% of New Jersey marketing companies anticipate a budget between $100,000 and $250,000 on mobile marketing in 2010, compared to only 22% of New Jersey marketing ccompanies a year ago.

About 13% of New Jersey's best ad agencies plan to spend from $250,000 to $500,000, up from 4% of New Jersey's ad agencies in 2009. More than 15% will have a budget of more than $1 million for mobile marketing campaigns, compared to only 11% a year earlier. 23% are budgeting less than $100,000 and 10% don't even know how much they are going to spend on mobile marketing.

The study also showed that 60% of full service ad agencies that aren't doing mobile marketing yet plan on buying mobile marketing in 2010.

30% of best ad agencies say that mobile marketing has become an integral part of the advertising media mix. Among full service ad agencies that have run mobile marketing campaigns, 78% said that they met campaign goals, while 80% said that they developed internal resources to support mobile efforts.

The proliferation of Google Android-based devices, such as smartphones, should help full service ad agencies, such as a retail advertising agency, an automotive ad agency, or a public relations agency more easily run campaigns across different smartphones.

Sao Paulo has now joined in the anti-outdoor advertising parade. The city of Sao Paulo, Brazil has banned billboard advertising, flashing neon signs, and electronic scrolling panels. As a result, fierce debate has sparked among the city's inhabitants.

City planners, architects, and environmental advocates have hailed the new legislation as bringing the city "one step closer to an imagined urban ideal" as they applaud the banning of visual pollution. One columnist calls it a "rare victory of the public interest over private, of order over disorder, aesthetics over ugliness, of cleanliness over trash".

On the other hand, however, advertisers and business groups oppose the decision. They say that free expression will be inhibited, jobs will be lost, and consumers will have less information about which products to buy. They argue that the availability of information is the essence of capitalism and consumer culture.

The new law also places rules on store signs and even on mobile outdoor advertising, such as on the side of a bus, or banners on airplanes and blimps. A court called the law unconstitutional because the federal government controls airspace, not the city government.

Popular reaction to the legislation has generally been very supportive, as the bill passed by with a whopping 45 to 1 vote. However, full service ad agencies and marketing companies fear that the legislation will profoundly negatively affect them, ultimately causing a loss in revenue and by extension, employment. There are 13,000 billboards that have been installed illegally, but the advertising agencies argue that they are merely scapegoats, and the real blame lies with another entity, possibly corrupt government officials taking bribes.

Last time I talked about addressing your prospects' problems through relevant direct mail messaging. This time I will talk about using direct mail advertising and email advertising together to drive up response rates.

Because of the recession, some people have been discontinuing their direct mail campaigns because they think it is not cost effective enough. However, as an automotive ad agency, a retail advertising agency, and a professional services advertising agency, we like to think that we know what we're talking about. We know that the real metric we should be looking at is not just investment cost, but ROI. According to the experts, direct mail followed up by an email has a much higher ROI than either form of communication alone when running an integrated marketing campaign. Direct mail by itself also has a higher ROI with business-to-business when running a single faceted campaign.

The reasons for this are as follows. Most of the time, direct mail lists are alot cleaner than email advertising lists. Also, generally speaking, people are more accepting of unsolicited mail than they are of unsolicited email. After all, it's much more likely to open up an email and get a computer virus than it is to open up some mail and get an actual virus. Next, for business-to-business, direct mail is still delivered even if the prospect is no longer with the company. Email addresses, on the other hand, are usually turned off when a person leaves an organization. Think of all the people that got laid off in the recession and how many email addresses must have been turned off. Lastly, direct mail is subject to an infinite amount of creative possibilities, whereas something like print advertising, television advertising, or billboard advertising always has to follow a certain preset format. Even email advertising has to follow a specific template most of the time. But direct mail advertising is only limited by your own creativity.

Direct mail is a great way to increase your b-to-b clientele, especially as part of an integrated marketing campaign. And because of the recession, the cost for direct mail has actually gone down. Use direct mail to start a conversation with your prospects; follow up that conversation with an email; direct that prospect to your online assets; and finish the conversation with a sale.

Global advertising fell more than expected in the first half of the year but the downturn could be bottoming out, a leading media agency said on Monday.

ZenithOptimedia said global ad expenditure in 2009 would drop 9.9 percent following the poor first half, compared with a predicted fall of 8.5 percent made in July.

"However, this downgrade almost entirely relates to first-half activity," the agency said in a report. "Since then improvements in economic confidence have been accompanied by positive signals from media owners that the downturn is bottoming out.

"We are still confident that the second half of the year will be much less painful for the ad market than the first half, and expect the market to hit bottom before the end of 2009."

Another media network, Carat AEGS.L, said in October it also expected global ad spend to fall almost 10 percent in 2009 before a return to slight growth in 2010.

Zenith said it now forecast a recovery in 2010 of 0.5 percent, down from its earlier forecast of 1.6 percent growth, with developing markets leading the way with 7.8 percent growth.

Developed markets, which are defined as North America, Western Europe and Japan, are forecast to shrink another 2.9 percent.

For 2011, Zenith expects 4.3 percent global growth, with developed markets showing a 1.5 percent recovery and developing markets growing 9.8 percent.

Of the different platforms, the Internet is the only medium expected to expand, with 9.2 percent growth forecast for 2009, while all other traditional media is set to shrink.

The report said print advertising, such as newspapers and magazines were in steep decline, with newspaper ad expenditure set to fall 17 percent this year, and magazine spend down 20 percent.

"By 2011 we forecast newspaper ad expenditure to be 25 percent below its 2007 peak, while magazine ad expenditure is 28 percent below its own peak," the report said.

"Prospects for other traditional media are more encouraging: we expect television advertising, cinema and outdoor advertising to return to growth in 2010, followed by radio in 2011."

--Source:  Reuters

In the last post, I wrote about optimizing your website to tell Google and your visitors where you are and what you do. But another important online place where it's absolutely critical to clearly identify where you are and what you do is your local business profile on Google Maps, Yahoo Local, and Bing Local.

Your Categories

In Google Maps, you can categorize your business in up to 5 categories. They may be standard categories that are provided by Google Maps or those that you can create yourself. Use 1-2 of the standard Google Maps categories that best fit your business, and then create 3-4 that contain your best keyword terms plus the geography terms for which you want to be found.

For example, as a New Jersey marketing company, we classify ourselves in the already established categories of Advertising, and Marketing. For our other four categories we use the top keyword phrases for which we want to be found, such as cable advertising, outdoor advertising, radio advertising, print advertising, traditional media advertising, or automotive ad agency.

The categories you choose may be based on any criteria that are important to you. Some suggestions are your most profitable procedures or the categories in which your strongest competitors have categorized themselves. The categories may also be based on some other criteria known only to you.

Use geographic terms in your categories in order to make it completely clear to Google where you do business. Using the names of nearby areas may also help your site rank better for those searches. For example, our office is in Westfield, NJ, but most searchers use "New Jersey" or "NJ" in their queries, so we use New Jersey terms in our categories instead of Westfield terms.

However, Yahoo Local and Bing Local do not allow you to create your own categories. So you must choose as many categories as you are allowed, picking the most appropriate and most important first.

Your Descriptions

Also use geography terms within the description area of your profiles, where you have complete control of what is written. These descriptions are crawled and indexed by the local spiders, so make certain they find your most important geographic terms within them.

Your Attributes

Attributes (only in Google Maps) allow you to go crazy with terms to tell spiders and humans what you do and where you do it. You can, in essence, create and name a field whatever you want and then populate it with terms describing that property.

Almost every business pulls people from both its immediate location and surrounding areas. So, you could create a field named Locations Served and list the towns and neighborhoods near you and from which your business typically draws customers.

Some business, like plumbing, carpet cleaning, lawn care, and pet sitting go to the customer instead of customers coming to them. For a business like this, you could title a field Service Areas and list the places where you are willing to travel to provide your services.

You can also include attributes that allow you to use keyword terms that contain geographic modifiers. For example, if you have an advertising agency in New Jersey, you could create a field titled New Jersey Marketing Services and populate it with terms like "New Jersey marketing", "traditional media in NJ", "best ad agency NJ", "online marketing consultants NJ", "public relations NJ", and "New jersey retail advertising agency". This is an effective way to help you rank for long-tail terms that apply to where you are and what you do.

Your Coupons

Although not every business type has been traditionally associated with coupons, creative entrepreneurs are finding ways to use them to their benefit. Nearly every business can offer some sort of discount or value-added coupon for its goods or services. For inspiration you can look around to see what your competitors are doing with coupons. Then, when you create your coupons, include your best keyword terms plus your location in the offers.

It's highly likely that attributes from Google Maps Local Business Listings and coupons from all of the platforms are pushed out to other places on the Web, such as Google Base and coupon Web sites, so the impact can be very far-ranging.

Local business listings are designed to help searchers find businesses in particular geographic locations. Make it easy for Google Maps, Yahoo Local, and Bing Local to tell where you are and what you do to increase the odds they will find your business when a relevant search is made.

What and where? These are the two big questions that must be answered over and over again in local SEM.

Local searchers ask these questions implicitly and explicitly. In some cases, geo-terms are used and in other cases they aren't. For example, search queries can be "best ad agency in NJ," "cable advertising NJ" or simply "best ad agency" or "cable advertising."

Search engines such as Google and Yahoo want to know the same things about your business that searchers want to know. Where is it and what products/services does it offer?

Are you answering these critical questions for your potential sales leads as well as the search engines?

Many times local businesses choose online marketing consultants based on the attractiveness of the websites they create without giving any thought to SEO. Even those website designers who know how to help with search rankings are rarely knowledgeable enough about the specifics of ranking for local search. As a result, the local business owner ends up with a beautiful website that never ranks for competitive keywords or attracts any new customers.

By following a few simple tips and tricks, you can prevent this from happening to your online marketing investment.

Your Home Page

You need to make it clear to people who land on your page what you do and where you do it. Simply because everyone in New Jersey knows where Broad Street is, it doesn't mean that everyone who sees a Broad Street address on your website will know that you're in New Jersey. The searcher may be entirely new to the area or just passing through, which may be the reason why someone may be searching for your business in the first place.

So, if you're a New Jersey marketing firm, don't expect people to look around to find that information on your site. Say it clearly near the top of the page and do it in text form, that way it is unmistakable to the search engines as well as to the searchers. Don't assume anything! It's important to make this information so clear that it can't possibly be misunderstood.

Your Page Title

This is the most important ranking factor for SEM. And if that isn't enough of a reason, then think about it from the human point of view.

Google displays the page title as the headline in the listing that appears for your pages in the SERPs. If someone is for searching for "marketing companies new jersey" and the headline they see in the search results says "THE Best of the Best Marketing Companies in NJ," it'll grab their attention much better than a headline that says "marketing company".

Google will also bold the words that were in a search query in the title when it appears on the page. So, for example, if a searcher in Central NJ asks for "co-op advertising" and your page title says "The Co-Op Advertising Professionals in Central NJ", then your title will look like this to the searcher: "The Co-Op Advertising Professionals in Central NJ".

Your Meta Tags

Along with your page title, these are also displayed in the SERPs. Meta tags are like the ad copy that entices people to click on your listings and go to your website.

Much like the page title, if your meta tags have the terms used in the search query then Google will bold these words on the SERPs. If the tags don't contain the keyword phrase that was used in the query, then Google will pull a snippet off the page that contains that phrase.

It's important to use your best keyword terms in your meta tags because, even though they may not help your pages to rank, they will likely encourage searchers to click through to your site.

In my next post, I will give more tips and tricks on how to clearly tell the search engines and the searchers where you are and what you do.

Email advertising is the most effective and cost-efficient medium available for your internet marketing campaign.  Email advertising enables you to develop a long-term dialogue and relationship with your customer.  However, if you abuse your email advertising campaign, you can also harm your relationship with your customer. So you must strike a delicate balance.

In order to reach that balance, you should combine informative content with promotional content. You should create the need for your product/service by providing relevant information. Then you can start the sales process by providing promotional content.  For example, car repair businesses can explain the importance of maintenance, the benefits of repairing instead of replacing, or even the symptoms of required maintenance before offering their services.

Because of this delicate balance that is required, careful planning is a necessity for your email advertising campaing. A successful campaign is constantly improving itself in order to meet customer expectations.

There are a couple of things you can do to maximize your ROI on email advertising.

First of all, make sure you use a valid return address.  The point of this type of internet marketing is to start a dialogue and end up with a loyal long-term customer.  As a result, your customers need to be able to respond to your emails so a long term relationship can be built.

Second of all, you need analytics to track your results.  This way you can measure exactly what you are doing right and what you are doing wrong.  You should track bounced emails, open rates, click through rates, and conversion rates.

Third of all, you shouldn't overload your customers with too many emails or too much information. Your customers can't spend all of their valuable time on your emails, so keep them short and simple.

Next, you must abide by CAN-SPAM laws that require your customers to agree to receive your emails. If you don't adhere to a strict opt-in policy, you may be fined, and your deliverability rates will suffer.

Then, make sure you keep your database interested by staying relative and on-topic. Your database expects quality content, or they wouldn't have signed up for your email advertising campaign in the first place.

Finally, use a proper email advertising tool that will make your email advertising campaign scalable. There are many tools out there, so you must determine which one fits your needs. Many online marketing consultants run email advertising campaigns as well, so you should probably do some research and weigh the benefits of doing it yourself versus the benefits of hiring an advertising agency.

By now, all you car dealers must know that having an internet presence is necessary for your business to succeed.  It's certainly not enough to just have a website.  You need an entire comprehensive internet marketing strategy.  A good automotive ad agency will offer a greatly scalable website, SEO capabilities, an SEM campaign, and e-commerce solutions, all tied together with trackability.  But how do you know which advertising agency you should go with?

The first thing that comes to mind is experience.  Has the agency that you are considering had enough experience in the marketplace?  Is it capable of innovation when it comes to new and exciting automotive marketing ideas.  Agencies with experience have had the time to develop strategies to keep up with the pace of the marketplace.  These are usually the agencies that are leaders in their areas of business.

The second thing is, of course, the services that the automotive ad agency offers.  Does it just offer website hosting, or just website creation?  Does it offer an entire comprehensive package of internet marketing tools?  It would be best for you if you can consolidate your internet marketing strategy into one agency and not have to go to a number of separate agencies for each internet marketing service.  Again, larger companies with more experience will most likely fit this bill.

Finally, the agency's reputation for increasing actual automotive sales leads should be the deciding factor if you're still on the fence.  Being able to carry out a comprehensive internet marketing strategy is all well and good, but if it doesn't increase your sales leads then what are you really paying for?  The ability to increase sales leads should always be the bottom line for any full service ad agency.

If you decided to go with your own in-house online marketing department instead of an advertising agency, then another helpful suggestion for your online marketing campaign is to position your online department as an entirely separate business.

The biggest advantage of your online marketing department operating on its own is that it will leverage most, if not all, of your existing expenses of your brick and mortar business.  How is this possible?  Well, the return from an internet marketing strategy can be exponentially greater than any other traditional media marketing strategy.  Why?  Because the realm of online advertising is global, not to mention the fact that a lot more people use the internet than any other traditional media, such as reading print advertising, i.e. a newspaper (which is slowly dying) or looking at television advertising (most people change the channel or get up to do something else during a commercial break).  Relatively speaking then, the cost of an online department (if run properly) is much cheaper than a traditional media department since the return is much greater (cost includes risk here).

You need to budget as much as you can into your online efforts.  If you hire an advertising agency, you should redirect a good portion of your marketing budget towards that endeavor.  However, if you decide to tackle your online marketing efforts on your own, you need to keep a few things in mind when budgeting.

There’s a lot that goes into an online marketing department.  Of course you have to hire staff (creative staff for the writing and design, IT staff for logistics, and probably an experienced online marketing consultant to act as the department head).  You need to get proper equipment, which includes a top-of-the-line computer (you definitely don’t want to deal with lag when running an internet marketing campaign).  You need to have software so your internet marketing department can do its work.  You need to have tracking programs so you know how much traffic your online campaign is building.

It’s like going to Vegas, or Atlantic City for us Jersey folk.  To win big you need to play big.  The more you invest, the more return you can potentially see (of course there’s always the chance that you’ll fail completely, but what’s business without risk).  Of course with all the required investments in creating your own online marketing department, the bill can run up pretty high.  If you’re a small business with a limited amount of capital, you might want to consider hiring an advertising agency.  Or if you're a small business with little to no time on your hands, such as a retailer or car dealer, you may even want to hire a niche specific advertising agency, like an automotive ad agency, or a retail advertising agency.  But if you can afford to allocate the necessary funds and time into an in-house online marketing department, then by all means do so.