Traditional sales and marketing campaigns for attracting new customers revolve around media advertising, cold calling, leaflet dropping, mail shots and a host of other direct sales techniques. All of these methods produce variable results and all have one thing in common – you pay for the campaign before you see any results and the results can be variable in the extreme.

Problems arise from a variety of sources, if you advertise with a newspaper, radio or TV you have the issue of measuring the return from your marketing investment. Using telesales can produce quality issues with many so called “hot leads” being nothing more than over eager operatives trying to make up their numbers to get paid.

Managing such marketing and sales campaigns is problematic, as once you’ve agreed to commit to either of these methods you have little or no input in how and where the resources are directed - nor the opportunity for responding to feedback as the campaign progresses.

In other words you’ve paid upfront for a variable result you have little control over once the expense has been incurred.

It makes business sense for you to pay only for a tangible, measurable result and that’s exactly why I’m such a big proponent of Internet marketing techniques. The reason is that they are measurable for a start, extremely flexible in real-time and allow you to drill down to the level of detail where you know how much you are GOING to pay for a particular result…..down to the cent!

Two major internet marketing tools can be found in Pay-per-Click and Pay-per-Call. Both of these methods share the same feature that separates them from traditional methods of marketing – they do not require you to spend money before you have a result.

Pay-per-Click allows you to bid on web based ads based on such criteria as the amount you’re prepared to pay (set in advance), geographical location and content or keywords. Successful bids direct clicks on an ad to your website and you pay only for that referral and the cost can be a fraction of a cent.

Pay-per-Call drives telephone calls to your business based on the same principles as Pay-per-Click, but you tend to pay more for this as you are receiving what is known as a “highly qualified” referral., that is, a potential customer who has already researched the market for a product or service and is now contacting you by telephone to discuss the purchase.

Pay-per-Click and Pay-per-Call have a major set of advantages over traditional methods such as:

• You set your budget and cost per referral beforehand, successful bids result in a referral either to your website or a telephone call to your business and if you are outbid you have no expense at all;
• You set parameters for referrals such as distance from your location and even control the time of day when you wish to receive referrals to coincide with your trading hours;
• The results that are generated are definite and measurable as billing is dictated solely by clicks to your website or telephone calls to a toll-free number redirected to your business;
• You have full management control over the process and can respond instantly to feedback as the campaign progresses in real-time; and
• You do not incur any cost until you have a referral and even then only at the cost level you have already decided beforehand.

For the local small business owner, nothing beats Pay-Per-Click and Pay-Per-Call when trying to increase leads – and sales – for your small business!