Before you begin a web project it’s important to research marketing and advertising strategies in the market you are looking to build your web application. Different market sectors have very different competitors and this will make a difference when you first start out. A lot of the time if there’s heavy competition you will have to market your product much better and most of the time pay more for advertising so your product is seen. It’s the typical supply and demand market.
If you don’t look into this before hand, you may find yourself with a great project but not enough in your budget to pay for the costs. You’ll have a great project, but no one will be able to see it because it will be too difficult to find on the web.
If you plan to implement SEO strategies as I discussed in the previous post, those strategies will take time. This is where marketing and advertising will buy you some time until the SEO strategies kick in. In any case for the project to be at its best advantage, it’s a good idea to implement a mixture of both strategies.
Marketing and advertising has many forms: newspapers, magazines, TV commercials, radio, Internet, etc. Since I mostly specialize in Internet, it’s probably the marketing strategies that I find myself most comfortable using. Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean put all your cookies in one basket. Diversify your strategies to hit different markets and target your audience.
Many people advertising on the Pay-Per-Click model which is used by companies such as Google and Yahoo. This type of advertising puts your name out there and when the user clicks the ad you are charged a fee. Another model is the Pay-Per-Acquisition model. This tends to cost a little more up front, but you are only charged when a customer makes a purchase. This looks to solve the problem of click fraud found in the Pay-Per-Click model. Google is looking into the strategies as well as other small companies. It’s not a bad idea to look into both.
Marketing and advertising take a lot of time due to the fact that the field has to be researched. It might be a good idea to hire a marketing specialist or a company to do this for you. It could save you some time and someone with a good reputation knows what they are doing and can put you in the market in a good spot.
The most important point is with all the marketing and advertising strategies that you implement for your web application, make sure that people will find it easy to find your website. If they can’t find it no one will use it. I hope this post helps and as always feel free to post a comment.
