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Business owners are consistently finding that the internet can be a highly effective marketing channel. Not only is it easy to track how effective your marketing is, but you can also use that data to consistently streamline and improve how you invest in that medium. On the Internet, it's also much easier to target consumers; you can do so by intent, demographics and context.

Measuring Returns

In order to ensure you achieve a strong ROI for your business, it's necessary to ensure you're measuring everything - and also testing everything too. Thanks to website analytics software, it is possible to measure which sources send traffic that converts into sales or the action you are looking for the consumer to take. You can also use website analytics software to test two alternatives to the one webpage - you can then know for sure what factors are improving and what factors are reducing conversion rates.

You may be asking: isn't it expensive? The answer is a firm no. You can use Google's free analytics software and get things started for free. Many large companies rely on Google analytics; however others choose to invest in more expensive solutions. It's up to you to decide for yourself. But, either way, getting analytics software installed is useful if you want to track the results of your internet marketing campaign.

Targeting Consumer Intent

The best way to target consumer intent is through search marketing. You can do this through either paid search advertising (Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing) or through using the services of an SEO to improve your websites rankings in the natural search results.

So, how do you use search marketing to target consumer intent? If you sell shoes for example, then you can be relatively confident that of the thousands of people that type 'shoes' into a search engine each day, some of them would like to buy shoes. You can show up in this search result, and target the intent of the consumer. A shoe retailing internet business, for example, would possibly like to appear for hundreds, or thousands of keyword phrases -- black shoes, white shoes, ladies shoes, trainers, slippers, golf shoes, boots and many more.

Targeting a Demographic Profile

If your product is popular among, or targeted towards, a certain demographic, then you will be able to use internet marketing to target suitable consumers in a way you would find hard to do in an offline environment. You can contact website owners, explain the demographic profile of your customer, and find out if they have enough traffic available at a reasonable price. Because they will know information about their visitors, and will be able to identify them by their IP address, log-in details, and other tracking methods, you'll only pay for impressions that matter to you.

Contextual Targeting

As a wedding planner, a wedding magazine would appear to be a great place to advertise your business offline. Internet advertising allows you to target consumers based on the context of the website or webpage that they are visiting. As a builder, wouldn't it be nice to appear on a webpage which has an article about "How to Find a Qualified Builder"? You can buy adverts that only show up on pages related to your products and services.