Cravenplan held another of their excellent seminars yesterday, this one was on email marketing, it looked at

And a whole lot more.

The seminar was well attended and the feedback after was excellent. This was the latest in the schedule of free seminars run by Cravenplan, the next is on 15th April and is entitled the law and the internet.

If you are interested in attending the event you can register at Free internet Seminars.

What percentage of my marketing budget should I allocate for online marketing?

This is a question we get asked a lot, how much should I budget for online marketing, and in truth there is no short answer, it is more about using the resources you have in the most effective manor.

One way to test the water and see if you product or service has an online market place and customers who are ready to buy is to run a small Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising campaign, a few hundred pounds is enough to test the water in most cases – you can use any of the main 3 search engines for this as they all have their own PPC sections.

The accounts are simple to set up you can set a budget for the campaign so you know how much it is going to cost you and once you have the ad and keywords in place you should set up conversion tracking to monitor the results.

One of the best things about PPC advertising is that you can change the settings as the campaign runs making tweaks and changes so that you get the most from your advertising.

Once you have established there is a market for what you are offering you can increase your budget and continue using just pay per click or for a longer term strategy you can invest in search engine optimisation (SEO) so your site can be found easily in the search engines.

So the answer to the original question is as much as you can once you have proven to yourself that it works, using the conversion tracking you can see how much each sale has cost you and from there you can work out the profit per £100 you spend on advertising and work out your marketing budget from there.

 Have you thought about using surveys on your website to track where your visitors are coming from and how they heard about you. You can see a great example of this at Cravenplan

Surveys are also a great way to discover what your customers think of the service you are offering and it is amazing the insight you can get on what products they were hoping to find.

Using this information you can target your advertising to the right market and can make sure that you are stocking products that these visitors want to buy, this will increase conversion rates and you can make more money per visitor.