Interactive Marketing

Depending on who you talk to SEO can almost be a bad word. Search Engine Optimization is exactly that, optimization; and it is a necessity for businesses on the internet. To understand why SEO is necessary you need a bit of basic background on internet history. Early on people simply surfed from site to site aimlessly. Search engine algorithms are still based on this outdated notion of how the internet is used. Sites are ranked based on how many links go into and out of the site, not on their content. The biggest problem for businesses is that a business wants exactly the opposite of a search engine. The search engine wants people to keep going from site to site, a business wants to fulfill its customers needs so its customers don't need to go to another site, and come directly back to your site the next time they have needs.
SEO has been abused by some leading to artificial penalties on site rankings for some of the cruder SEO methods often touted on internet. Keyword stuffing and invisible text are two examples of techniques that will lower your sites ranking. SEO requires an understanding of the extremely complex mathematics that run search engines and constant attention to which techniques are being labeled as black hat by search engines.

Pay per click allows marketing directly to your target audience allowing you to only pay for advertising to your target audience. By targeting in this manner advertising costs are minimized while returns on investment are maximized.
Pay per click is truly revolutionary but it must be expertly executed. Too general of add offerings and you spend most your money on dead ends. Too specific and your add rarely gets offered making it ineffective. Pay too much per click and you lose money to click fraud, pay too little and your add ends up on only low ranking pages. Possibly the worst risk is also likely the easiest, mistype a decimal point or misallocate and you could see a hundred times your monthly advertising budget spent in a single day.
With benefits like these on the line and risks this large you really need an interactive marketing expert to help you along the way.

Twitter, blogger, facebook, linked in and a multitude of other sites not only allow you to target advertising but also allow you a much broader range of interaction with your current and potential customers. Reviews, polls, market analysis and feature research are all possible and this information can be often obtained without having to directly compensate your test group, who will express their opinions candidly and freely. This means that the only costs are the administrative costs associated with the interaction that your business chooses.

Mass directed mailings to groups of people that are likely to be interested in your goods or services can be very productive when handled correctly.
Inquiry Handling is of paramount importance. By the time someone inquires they already have a need and have identified your company as a likely source for filling their need. Inquiries must be converted into not only into customers but also into word of mouth advertising and recommendations. Obviously randomly picking a busy employee to answer each inquiry would be very inefficient so your business needs to weigh the options of who will be the first responder to inquiries and whether to have it be a live employee or an autogenerated reply. To make a good decision you need an interactive marketing team to consult with so you can make the best decisions for your company.

This is the most overlooked portion of marketing, and possibly the most powerful part of interactive marketing. Due to the interactivity now possible your customer can choose what areas they specifically need educated about. Advanced features of your products or services can be taught to customers without bothering them with things they already know or making them wade through a lot of information on features they are not interested in. By providing education and training, at little cost to the company per customer, your company is able to showcase Features, explain Advantages and point out Benefits to current and future customers.