The question I’m constantly pondering with others these days is whether online advertising can work, and whether it can work for the advertiser as well as the publisher.

The simple answer is yes, but I think the long answer is how it can be done.

Obviously traditional media, of whom are slowly moving online, are able to secure their advertisers from an existing customer base.

With niche bloggers I think it’s a completely different story.

Do bloggers need to hire sales people to go out and pitch their publication to companies?

I think they certainly need someone to go out with a positive attitude and do exactly that; it may even be themselves.

From what I’m starting to hear from the likes of Garry Vaynerchuk and others, pitching seems like the only way to go.

I guess in economic times like now, with advertising budgets usually the first thing to get the chop, it’s all about convincing the brands why they need to advertise with you.

With events in Sydney like Social Media Club, Mumbrella Masterclass, and others, many of the decision makers in business are attending such events and beginning to understand that having an online presence, keeping as transparent as possible, using the tools available, and using them properly, is crucial if they want to keep up with where the eyeballs are going.

Now some PR agencies with large marketing budgets usually put their money into the big media brands.

They put in their reports, say they reached X many eyeballs, at X publication, in X category, on X website, and that’s it.

The company who hired them is happy, the marketing agency is happy, and the product/service hopefully sells.

The one problem I have with this strategy is the Return on Investment (ROI).

I believe PR advertising budgets will soon start to consider ROI more as figures become harder to use wite-out on.

ROI is is crucial if you have a small PR marketing budget that needs to reach the right eyes.

With the Internet enabling advertisers to measure how successfully an online campaign is, I believe they should leverage their marketing budgets appropriately.

The other thing advertisers need to understand is that the CPC (Cost Per Click) model is not enticing to a publisher at all.

Just because an advertisement is not clicked doesn’t mean someone didn’t pay attention to it and then googled the product later because of that advertisement.

The CPM (Cost Per Thousand) model is now where it’s at.

There are so many niche websites on the web, with perhaps a small audience, that can offer you, as an advertiser, a far better ROI.

To give an example of ROI on an advertising campaign, I recently heard of a local publisher advertising a service that was incredibly niche to what it wrote about.

The advertisement ran for one month on the website and delivered more than 100 emails to the advertiser, of which lead to over 5 leads and 1 successful business deal. How’s about that for a successfully campaign!

So getting back to the point of this post.

1. PR agencies need to focus on ROI when it comes to their marketing budget.
2. Bloggers needs to work harder in convincing PR agencies that they can offer a far better audience.
3. The company that hires the PR agency needs to keep an eye on ‘em to see if the campaign is successfully working!

Relevant advertising works people!