Previously I wrote that as a guide you should look to re-allocate at least 20-25% of your existing marketing budget towards online marketing. Specifically I mention PPC advertising, also known as Search Engine Marketing. It is a good first step. But there are more options for you that you can spend your marketing dollars on as well and see a measurable return.

The 3 main components of a good online campaign (all compliment each other) are:

1. Search (paid listings, organic listings)

2. Email (mailing lists, newsletters, etc.)

3. Social (blogs, forums, community driven sites)

With search, you want to make sure to invest money, time, and resources into making sure your organic search ranking is high. This means that for the keywords that apply to your site, when a user searches for them on say Google or Yahoo that you are within the first few results returned (preferably the first 3 results). In addition you want to be bidding on those same keywords via PPC advertising through both Yahoo and Google. Users are more likely to click on either your organic search result or your paid search result if they have seen your brand/listing/url more than once. Hitting them twice on a single page dramatically increases your chances of attracting the customer to your site. Of your online marketing budget I would look to allocate as much as 60% of your budget towards search strategies.

With email you want to start devising a plan for acquiring and building a list of your clients/site visitors in which they have opted in to being contacted by you. Ideas for building a list include starting a newsletter, providing items for download such as a whitepaper or ebook, or even providing discount or coupon notifications. And there are likely many other ways of doing it depending on your industry. Once you have a list, keep it up to date and make sure to keep it clean. This is an invaluable sales tool for you to promote your services and to talk to your customers. On email, I would allocate no less than 25% of your budget. Again this is you communicating directly with the clients who endorse you and want to hear from you!

The last piece of your strategy is Social marketing. The internet world has gone “social” crazy. We have Facebook, My Space, YouTube, just to name a few of the big social site names. You can choose to advertise with such services. For instance using Facebook’s newly launched targeted ad service which works much like Google Adwords or Yahoo SEM. But that is not the most important piece of investing in the Social arena. Instead you want to be a part of it. Create a blog for instance. Or add a user review section to your ecommerce site where users can review products. Create and participate in forums based on your service. DO whatever it takes to further open up the lines of communications with your users. That is what the Social Scene is all about. User interaction. I would look to allocate 15% of your budget here now, but expect this to grow over time. The reason I would only invest 15% now is that, while booming, the social scene is still developing. Once the dust settles a little more and knowing where exactly to focus the majority of your funds becomes clearer and more defined, then you can look to increase the budget.