Every business requires sales to function. Every business owner often wonder, how do I get more sales?

Most businesses often start with the traditional marketing methods such as flyers distribution, mailing of sales brochures, cold call, cold fax and of course word of mouth.

Now, all there any more cost effective marketing method? There definitely is .

Search engine marketing to lower the cost of acquiring customer and branding. It has effectively done so for many fortune 500 companies and SMEs, so why not you?

What is search engine marketing, pay per click? Yahoo and Google, two of the biggest search engine offers an online marketing service which you will pay to them to display your advertisement when people search for keywords related to your business.

Example

I am in the web design industry. I selected the keywords, Web design company. (There is broad base, exact match and other options when defining your keywords which I will touch on later.) Someone on the internet either uses Yahoo! and Google search for the word, web design company and my advertisement in text will show up. For Yahoo!, on the top of the search results while for Google either on the top 2 of search results or the right side of the search results.

How can this lower cost for acquiring customer?

For different industry, the cost is different, but for most industry, it cost between $0.50 to $1.50 per click to bring one visitor to their web site. Now, assume your average cost per click is $1.00 and assuming your web site is well built to convert visitors contact you to become a sales lead. We assume a 10% conversion to sales lead per 100 visitors. So, for 100 visitors, it will cost you $100.00. In every 100 visitors, 10 people will contact you regarding your business products or services. So, $100.00 divided by 10, it will be $10.00 per sales lead. Now, isn't this the cheapest way of acquiring sales lead?

No? Consider word of mouth marketing, if you value your work at $20.00 per hour and it takes you 1 hour to get the message across for every person you meet to promote your business. Wouldn't that cost you more than $10.00 per sales lead?

The best part of search engine marketing?

Search engine marketing is targeted, people who only are interested in your products will search for keywords related to your product. (Of course you got to know what is the best keywords to advertise.) Search engine marketing budget is restrictable. You can set whatever budget you want for your marketing effort online. The process is always the same except the result is only vary by the amount you are willing to spend.

Thus, many companies who think they cannot afford to market are wrong. Search engine marketing is available for every business, however, do it the right way by doing some research yourself or hire the professionals to get the best result.

Adrian Lee is CEO of VibrantStyle A Singapore Internet marketing company that builds web sites that focus on professional SEO friendly web design & web application.