We’ve all heard of it by now, the Consumer Protection Act or CPA for short, effective since the 1^st of April 2011. Finally the “little guys” have the power, to a degree, when buying goods and services. The act covers various consumer rights relating to buying goods and services; the return, repair and refunds thereof; fixed agreement terminations and a few others. The areas of the act that we will focus on that impacts on marketing, though, are: Right 2: the right to privacy, and Right 3: the right to fair and responsible marketing.

Gone are the days of telesales agents calling you at every conceivable hour of the day to sell you that Cellphone contract that you do not want or need. Also, you have the right to demand being removed from mailing lists if you receive spam text SMS’s that do not give you the option to opt out. This also pertains to all other forms of spam emails and other correspondence. This is certainly great news for the consumers, but how does this affect the marketers of all these goods and services? Well now there are fewer avenues to reach potential customers, but there is one avenue that many marketers are starting to rely on to reach an ever-growing online market.

The online population has exploded in the last ten years, with companies like Facebook having more users than all but 3 countries’ populations on earth and marketing budgets all over the world are moving over from the old traditional forms to the new age of marketing, online marketing. The biggest player on the online information/ search engine market is undoubtedly Google. Whenever there is something you want to know, buy or sell, Google can provide you a portal to literally Billions of websites, information and potential customers.

So what does this have to do with the CPA, well it comes down to two words: Permission Marketing. Permission marketing, the opposite is called interruption marketing, is when consumers give you “permission” to advertise and sell to them by clicking on adverts and websites and by searching for information or products. Thus they are coming to you for this info and thus the CPA places no restrictions on this form of marketing. Many large companies are relying heavily on their websites to sell their products and services and some companies do not even have physical offices anymore.

To conclude, the CPA has contributed heavily to the changing face of marketing in South Africa and marketers everywhere have had to adapt their strategies to accommodate this. Companies are spending millions each month advertising using Google and Facebook ads as well as optimizing their websites to rank high on search engines (SEO). The only question that remains is “Can you afford not to adapt your marketing strategy as well”?

Today it is extremely important to have an online presence and without any marketing, your website would not get the right traffic for the products or services you provide. A lot of small companies start by doing some type of internet marketing themselves to drive traffic to their websites in the form of PPC, some SEO or via social media. Soon they will find out that this is a full time job and to do it properly they will need professional help.

This week we will have a look at why you need to get professional help for your website, from the management of the website to all types of online marketing that can be utilised. The online marketing industry is an ever changing environment and if you are running your own company and still need to keep track of all the best practices needed to stay ahead something will get left behind.

Online marketing professionals work with websites and the marketing thereof everyday and trusting a company to handle your website might be worth a lot more than just the extra money that you will spend for their services.

People that I’ve met that ran their own PPC campaigns for example, realized that it was getting too involved for them to manage it properly. After handing it over to us they could focus more on their business and performance of the PPC campaigns also improved. Trying to do SEO yourself might be a bit more tricky because SEO is a lot more technical. You need someone that understands the technical side of how websites and search engines work to do that properly. Managing your social media marketing by yourself might work for a while but you will soon realize that as it grows that it will become time consuming, and you will never get to everything that you have to and do proper management of your Facebook and Twitter accounts.

Do check back here the rest of the week for more reasons why you should use an online marketing expert.

I know this has probably been discussed so many times online that everyone is an expert on the topic by now. Everybody understands the strengths and weaknesses of either form of marketing by now… But then why is it still so difficult to sell it to some top management executives or directors? If everyone knows about the awesome benefits of online marketing why are so few companies really harnessing its powers?

The answer is most people don’t understand it or have bad experiences of marketing online. The key here is simple, just like with any other traditional marketing your strategy needs to be clearly defined but before we go into that lets look at the two different forms.

Traditional marketing can be defined as any form advertising that was used prior to the Internet. The lines are definitely being blurred but this is a good rule of thumb to live by. Classic forms of this are radio, TV, billboards and flyers. Anything since then that is served using an Internet connection can be classified as an online marketing.  Online marketing includes search engine marketing, banner advertising, email marketing and quite a few more.

Now where these fundamentally differ is in the goals that they achieve. Traditional marketing has most of its power vested in building and broadening reach of businesses brands. This is definitely a key factor that no company could survive without. Online marketing on the other hand is a form of direct marketing, which means that the audience has the chance to directly respond to advertising as they are exposed to it. This vastly increases ROI as users are able to respond while they experience a need compare to traditional where they need to remember it so they can respond to it later.

Another factor that sets apart the two forms of advertising is measurability. Online marketing is the clear winner when it comes to measurability as it takes place in an environment that allows us to track our customers from the adverts they click on till they perform actions that are valuable to our business. Traditional marketing has developed some forms of tracking but they have stumbling blocks, one of the biggest being that they rely on human memory. People forget the tracking telephone number you offer them or they forget to claim the discount code which kills most tools you have to track traditional adverts. This means you will only ever be able to see a sample of the users that traditional marketing generates.

The high ROI of online marketing means even SME’s can take advantage of it and yield great results from it. They can also measure exactly where their leads are originating from and optimize their campaigns accordingly. When it come to corporate companies the combination of traditional marketing and online marketing means that prospective customers manage to find you after you have stimulated a need with traditional marketing. Not only that but the branding power of your traditional marketing campaign means that your visitors from online marketing will convert into leads or sales far higher than when using only one form.

So how do you convince your boss? Well you now have some facts to use and my favorite is measurability. The fact that you can launch an online marketing campaign and track every lead or sale generate by it means that you will be able to demonstrate the benefits even when you implement a smaller test campaign.

Directors need to make a business run sustainably and this means that it comes down to numbers for them. If you can show them the return on investment that online marketing generates they would be crazy not to buy into the idea.