Banner advertising has slowly been losing favor for a number of years. Finally, a survey reveals that more than 50% of small businesses are abandoning online banner advertising next year in favor of SEM, e-mail marketing, and social media. This doesn’t really surprise me. Small business owners are wising up.
It just so happens that SEO, SEM, and e-mail marketing are the three top result getters in online marketing. It’s no wonder then that small business owners are ready to start spending money on these forms of online marketing instead of spending money on banner advertising and watching it evaporate into thin air.
SEO is still number one for results. Google is still the top referrer for most websites and organic search is still the No. 1 traffic source for most websites. Pay per click marketing, however, or SEM, is No. 1 for most cost effective means of online advertising. And e-mail marketing is tops for targeted captured results. That is, your opt-in subscribers are ready to buy if you give them an offer they can’t refuse.
The surprising piece of this puzzle is social media. It’s taken small businesses awhile to come around to trusting this form of online marketing. And the results are really starting to show for the first time, which might have something to do with building that confidence.
I just wanted to take this time to applaud small business owners for coming around to knowing what we Internet marketers have known for awhile. Online banner advertising is very low on results so why throw good money away? Divert it to forms of marketing that have proven to work.