by Daniel Hadaway

If you’re planning to begin marketing your business online, there’s a chance you’ve got a plan laid out for all the different types of marketing you’d like to utilize. It’s important to note, however, that while most businesses will see success from all online marketing channels, different types of online marketing lend themselves more favorably to specific vertical markets.

Remember, that at the end of the day, the purpose of marketing is (most of the time) to generate sales for your business. The best way to do that is by finding users who may be already prepared to buy your product or service. With this in mind, we can look at how the behavior of consumers in specific verticals is uniquely influenced by online marketing and popular website formats.

Mashable recently posted an infographic called How to Influence Purchasing Decisions on the Web, which outlines how consumer behavior is affected by different online channels. For example, we can see that the top influencer in the automotive category is brand websites, followed by search results. So, if you’re an auto dealer you might want to consider focusing your initial efforts on creating an awesome website, optimizing it for SEO, and investing in paid search ads. The influence for baby products is much more social, with the top influencers being forum comments, Facebook, and blog posts. So if you’re ready to launch a new line of baby pacifiers, you might want to invest in reputation management, off-page SEO (inbound links, etc.), and Facebook advertising.

Your business category may not be listed in the infographic, but it’s important to start your marketing efforts armed with some knowledge of the buying behavior of your target audience. The best source for such knowledge will be an experienced digital marketing company (hint hint!) who is willing to help educate you based on their past experience in your vertical market.

Starting out your marketing efforts with thorough knowledge of your target audience, and then acting based on that knowledge is the best method to ensure success from your digital marketing efforts!

With more and more prospects consuming media online each and every day, display advertising enables businesses to reach new customers and put your brand front-and-center, creating consumer demand and brand awareness by providing:

• A wide range of targeting options that include demographic, behavioral and contextual – Hone in on your audience and provide messaging that caters more closely to a specific target market.
• Branding impact that will help prospects remember your products/services closer to a buying decision.
• The ability to track important metrics such as impressions, clicks and conversions, and calculate ROI for each display campaign.
• Test ad creative variations by changing out call to actions, design elements, promotions, etc.

Smart advertising captures demand by providing solutions and services to potential customers that are actively engaged in searching for products that fulfill specific needs. Smarter advertising both captures AND creates demand, an approach that with the right display advertising campaign can be extremely effective in widening your sales net.

The answer is behavioral targeting. Behavioral targeting is simply a method of customizing the content of ads shown to you, based on your past behavior online. The advertiser knows you’re interested in canine dental cleanliness because you searched on one of their network’s sites for ‘toothpaste for dogs’…

The advertiser keeps track of this and uses it to provide you with ads that you will find more relevant and useful. The upside for you is that ads become an actual useful tool for improving your quality of life. If you’re going to see an ad anyway, why not make it useful to you and your unique likes and dislikes?

As marketers, what excites us about behavioral targeting in advertising is that it is much more effective than standard display advertising. A recent study by the Network Advertising Initiative (NAI), and reported by eMarketer tells the story:

The study, which looked at ads run on member networks during 2009, showed that among users who clicked on a behaviorally targeted ad, 6.8% converted. That compared with only 2.8% of those who clicked on a run-of-network ad.

Behaviorally targeted ads are more than twice as effective! And they’re effective simply because they are simply more useful, thus more compelling, to the users.

So go ahead and buy that doggy toothpaste! That ad you see could be custom-tailored for you!

Read on to find out how…

In the early days of digital marketing, online display advertising was virtually the only kind of advertising being used on the internet. As time went on, many sizes and formats have provided additional creative opportunities for advertisers looking to create awareness, build brand and generate response.  The problem for most small and medium sized businesses is that buying advertising on any one website provides minimal opportunity to reach their best prospects.

People spend enormous amounts of time on the Internet, but there isn’t one website they spend a majority of their time on.  This is a problem for online display advertising because space for such ads is generally sold by the individual websites. If you’re an advertiser, you simply don’t have the time to go to multiple websites and make deals to place ads individually on each one. And then of course, there is the need to design and develop compelling creative. This is where South Central Media provides a solution.

In addition to developing effective creative, South Central Media simplifies the media buying process by forging relationships with the largest advertising networks powered by Google and Yahoo in order to reach over one million websites that collectively reach 90% of all Internet users. Through a real-time auction process, online publishers bid to accept advertising from South Central Media clients. Layer on top of that the ability to target advertising based on user interests within a geographic area and you’ve got the most cost efficient way to buy online display advertising.