How effective is online marketing in driving business to your company? Just how important is it to have an effective website that customers and potential customers can find and use to research the products and services you sell? Very effective – and very important – according to survey results recently released by Opinion Research Corporation.

Almost two-thirds of the respondents (61%) polled in June of 2008 reported “consulting online reviews, blogs and other sources of online customer feedback before purchasing a new product or service.” Search engines like Google or Yahoo!, quite naturally, were the preferred method for respondents conducting online searches.

These results from Opinion Research Corp. confirm recently released consumer numbers from JupiterResearch that show consumers spend $6 on offline purchases influenced by their online research for every dollar that they spend online. An effective online marketing presence in the form of a web page or website that is optimized so that search engines like Google can find and index your business site is quickly becoming a business must as more and more consumers are doing their window shopping online. Effective online marketing and Internet advertising are now business critical issues, particularly for large and small companies dealing in products and services in highly competitive marketplaces.

Opinion Research Corporation ranked the product and services categories that were researched the most online by their respondents in the following order:

Travel/Recreation/Leisure 82%
Electronic goods 80%
Household products/services 66%
Clothing 55%
Automotive 55%
Personal care 40%
Food 24%

June 24, 2008 – The growing importance of online marketing to small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) was re-emphasized again today in a new report released by JupiterResearch. The report emphasizes the growing importance of online marketing not just for SMBs conducting their business online or heavily invested in e-commerce, but for all SMBs.

The numbers show that consumers’ online research habits are having a huge spillover effect onto their offline shopping habits. “For every $1 online users spent online in 2007,” JupiterResearch notes, “they spent roughly $6 on off-line purchases that were influenced by online research.”

While a storefront presence is still necessary to capture foot traffic for most SMBs, the exponential rise in the number of potential customers using Internet search – particularly, local search and mobile search – to make products and services choices should make capturing web traffic a similar priority for SMBs. The JupiterResearch numbers show that more and more consumers are “Windows” shopping, as well as window shopping.

The growing numbers of consumers who are surfing the Internet to make their product choices indicate that Internet advertising and establishing an effective online marketing presence are already business-critical issues of importance to all SMBs – and that importance is only likely to rise.

Exploiting consumer demand for videocsting and online videos on YouTube is the next challenge for those in the online marketing and Internet advertising industries.

Media polling firm, Ipsos-MediaCT, reports a drop in the percentage of time active Internet users – i.e., those who have ever downloaded a video from the internet – spend watching video on TV from 75% in February 2007 to 70% in February 2008. This is highly significant when one considers that “about half of all Internet users aged 12 and up have streamed a video file online in the past 30 days,” according to Ipsos’ research.

As YouTube’s owner, Google moves to capitalize on the video sharing site it purchased for $1.65 billion in 2005, its investment is paying off. Forbes.com, the online branch of the magazine that specializes in tracking wealth and riches, estimates that YouTube’s billion-plus views per day will garner Google $200 million in revenue in 2008, and a further $350 million in 2009. There may be even more upside to this, as Google moves to allow its “content partners”, primarily indie film makers, to upload 1 gigabyte video clips the size of feature length films to YouTube. Longer clips will mean more advertising opportunities and additional revenue.

The growing importance of video as a tool and medium for online marketing and Internet advertising is seen in the search results on the main search engines where YouTube videos are beginning to consistently rank on relevant key word terms. The rise of video and the importance of YouTube as an online advertising platform is only likely to expand as Google has made figuring out how to monetize and make YouTube pay off one of its top goals for 2008.

Recent Canadian newspaper coverage highlights the growing impact that mobile search will have on online marketing as stories about the release of Apple’s new 3G iPhone and Roger’s Communication’s Inc.’s proposed new cellphone plans hit the wires.

It is expected that it will be easier and cheaper for Canadians to conduct mobile searches on the Internet from their mobile phones as Roger’s Communications is set to roll out new mobile broadband packages to support the “slew of new data-heavy mobile devices” that Roger’s is set to release, reports the National Post.

Of course, one of these “new data-heavy mobile devices” is the latest model of Apple’s 3G iPhone, that Apple CEO, Steve Jobs, unveiled to the world on June 10th. “The new, thinner phone will go on sale in 22 countries on July 11 and run on third-generation, or 3G, wireless networks that deliver Internet content at least two times faster than the prior model,” according to Mr. Jobs, who publicly unveiled the new iPhone for the first time at the Apple’s developer conference held in San Francisco. Roger’s has secured Canadian rights to the new iPhone when it is released in Canada, the United States and around the world on July 11th.

The ability of consumers to easily conduct mobile searches online from their handheld devices will be greatly enhanced with the next-generation iPhone, and companies – from small businesses to the largest multinationals – are taking note and preparing themselves for what is predicted to be a new wave of customers increasinbly using mobile search and local search to locate the products and services they are looking for. These developments only highlight the importance of online marketing to a company’s bottom-line as Apple, RIM, Nokia and their competitors roll out new products to tap consumer demand for mobile search capabilities.

As online marketing and advertising begin to outstrip traditional advertising media – TV, radio and print -  as the medium that will drive customers to their office or storefront (whether that is a digital online office or storefront on a company’s web page, or the old-fashioned ‘bricks-and-mortar’ variety) businesses, large and small, are grappling with how to advertise and market their products and services online and what is the most effective way to do this.

David Wei, CEO for Alibaba.com, a leading website providing business-to-business (or B2B) networking and connectivity, has observed that, “Going global has never been easier and more affordable for a small- to medium-sized enterprise (SME), especially from the relative comfort of one’s own factory, shop or home office.”

Mr. Wei notes that, the “Internet has ushered in new tools to bring trading partners together using search engines, portals and online marketplaces.”  Mr. Wei notes that online marketing and B2B marketplaces like Alibaba.com are replacing traditional marketing venues like  trade shows, catalogues and trade associations, just as internet advertising is gradually replacing traditional print, TV and radio as source for advertising placements.

Importantly, Alibaba.com’s CEO, points out the choice that all businesses, particularly small-to-medium sized enterprises (or SMEs), must face when taking their advertising and marketing campaigns online, or starting up a fresh marketing campaign, is whether to channel time, money and effort into paid advertising and marketing (the banner ads, and pay-per-click sponsored ads on Googl or Yahoo! etc.), or whether to invest those resources in organic marketing.

Pay-per-click has its place and a company can bid and pay for advertising spots, just like it would do for TV and other old media ads, but pay-per-click has its limitations.   “A search engine is more consumer-traffic driven with no budget guarantee,” Mr. Wei suggests, “so costs can accumulate without any reasonable assurance of sales. There is also a serious global issue of click fraud, whereby competitors click repeatedly to increase your pay-per-click advertising costs.”  ”At this time,” Mr. Wei says, “there is no known solution that can eliminate 100% of click fraud.”  With pay-per-click it can thus become difficult to know that you are paying for what you get.

The alternative to pay-per-click is to market and advertise online using the internet’s organic search capabilities to get your products and services noticed and ranked at the top of the search engines’ results page. There is nothing like having your site appear “above-the-fold”, so to speak, on the Google results page for the key words that describe your business to drive sales. While this is not “paid advertising” per se, there are definite costs in terms of the aforementioned resources of “time, money and effort” that an SME will need to expend building an effective online marketing campaign organically.

Mr Wei’s advice for small-to-medium sized enterprises is, that “it is best to have someone in-house with keyword marketing expertise. Otherwise, you should consider using marketing firms which have a proven success rate of getting companies to rank higher in search results.”

Sound advice. But even if an SME tries to build an in-house capability for online marketing, how can the business influencer or decision-maker be assured that the person they are looking to hire has the search engine optimization expertise to successfully orchestrate a full online marketing campagn, particularly if one’s marketing mix is to use both pay-per-click and organic search engine optimization? The answer may be to test the online marketing waters first and take your online marketing and online advertising campaigns to a company whose search engine optimization specialists have organic and pay-per-click experience.