With more advertisers appearing in the online space, competition can be fierce for the usual suspects – PPC, banner advertising, affiliate marketing and SEO.  It’s easy to see why there’s a need for alternative online marketing techniques, ones not yet discovered by the masses and therefore easier or cheaper to utilize.

Social media marketing has been hailed as a great alternative and can often seem cheaper than the busier areas of online marketing.

But before you rush to jump on the social media bandwagon, consider this – are you sure you have your basics covered in your online marketing strategy?

I recently came across a company that, while needing to cut back in other areas, still found the budget to spend over £300K on a rebrand and a new campaign concept.  This, of course, without any further media costs that would be attached to using this new concept either online or offline.  I cringed when I thought how far such money could go in a simple PPC campaign.

Traditional branding is one of those things that would make most direct marketers cringe, but social media marketing, although hailed as cutting edge and fuelled by praise from early adopters, is not 100% different from traditional marketing and brand-based advertising.  In both cases one can get carried away with the beauty of emerging technology or the process of generating a truly original campaign and forget about actually generating sales.

While it may seem easier and cheaper to put your ads in front of people using new and untapped methods, the path to conversion may not be straightforward.  Some things are cheap for a reason, while others are expensive and yield little tangible results.

On the other hand, PPC, and bog standard SEO may not be the hottest new craze, but they are tried and tested and yield results for exactly the same reason they always have – people who are already searching for the type of product and service you provide are likely to be easier to convert.

Of course, even though PPC is probably the fastest way to bring in targeted traffic, it can be both competitive and expensive nowadays.

There are signs that the recession has started affecting even the PPC world, with advertisers cutting their spending (often as a result of lack of understanding of how online marketing works) but this does not always translate into an easy ride.

In some industries, there are simply less clicks to work with, meaning the prices go up.  That said, PPC is still an essential part of just about any marketing strategy.  If you think your strategy needs an injection of creativity, you should probably consider finding creative ways of maximising your PPC budget before rushing off to try something new.

Also, let’s not forget about the humble SEO…Traditionally, in times of financial crisis, it’s best to make do with what you already have and make it work harder for you.  Organic SEO, especially taking stock of your website and mending anything that can be damaging to your ranking is a must.  Such an investment can yield results in months and years to come at a fraction of the cost of PPC – handy if your competition has pushed you out of the top PPC positions!

Every marketing campaign is a risk with audience response being somewhat of an unknown.  Even long-running well-performing campaigns can turn.  But some disciplines are more reliable than others and, if done correctly, more concerned with issues such as conversions and the bottom line.  Although any company that wants to succeed needs to be willing to take risks and spend some money testing, now is not the time to be turning the main focus away from methods that simply work.

If you have a test budget in place, it would be useful to spend some of it on small-scale tests of alternative methods to see if they perform for you.  The main focus however, should still be finding alternative ways of getting the best out of things that are already proven to work.

Shimrit Elisar