Overwhelmed by the offerings, features, and pricing plans of various online marketing providers? Keep your vendor information and business priorities organized with this vendor comparison checklist from Business.com. It provides a breakdown of the many services you may be shopping for to help you quickly assess the best vendor for your needs.

1. A Complete Checklist for Evaluating
Online Marketing Companies
This checklist shares some of the key factors you should take into
consideration when comparing online marketing companies.

2. An Overview of Online Marketing
Online marketing is a broad subject, but
it's beneficial to have an overview of the range of
online marketing techniques before choosing those
that make the most sense for your business. This
whitepaper and checklist will provide you with brief
descriptions of the major online marketing
techniques, along with the information you need to
evaluate the offers of different Internet marketing
providers. Common types of online marketing
include:
• Website Marketing
• Search Engine Marketing
• Email Marketing
• Social Media Marketing
• Content Marketing
• Multimedia Marketing
Online marketing, also referred to as digital
marketing, is an area for increased spending for
businesses of all sizes. A 2013 study found that
66% of small businesses are maintaining or
increasing spend on digital marketing in the
upcoming months.
Online marketing provides businesses with the
opportunity to connect with a larger audience than
they could through more traditional tactics, and
often at a lower cost. With so many online
marketing options, it can be difficult to decide which
tactic is the best for your business. This brief guide
and comprehensive checklist will help.
Businesses and organizations spend
billions of dollars every year designing, building,
and managing websites, blogs, newsletters, and
social networking profiles. Reduced marketing costs
and improved results are the final product for almost
all who've used them. These include techniques that
were cutting-edge 20 years ago and are
commonplace now: email, online newsletters,
websites, search advertising, webinars, etc. On top
of those staples of online marketing, whole new
layers have been added in the form of social
networks such as Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and
Twitter. Not only has the way people use the Internet
changed, but the content that's being consumed is
also changing.
1. “2013 AT&T Small Business Technology Poll,” AT&T, 2013.

3. Social Media Marketing
Social networks are relatively new and have taken
the world by storm. These new kinds of websites
sprang up that were built on crowdsourcing search
results-that is, what your family, friends, and
colleagues say about which products and services
work best is more important than what a marketer
tells you. But, marketers started “listening in” on
conversations people were having about their
services or products. Social networks are now a
place for people to connect with others AND a
place for businesses to connect with customers.
Common social networks used by businesses
include:
Facebook has 1.5 billion monthly active users1.
Twitter has over 550 million users2 and more
than 1 billion unique users visit YouTube each
month3.
Many companies have stumbled in social
marketing by pushing too hard, violating terms of
service, or annoying potential followers. Because
social marketing is all about building a positive
reputation online, it's something that should be
approached carefully to avoid a very public
misstep.
Social networking providers can help you build or
improve your social networking profiles – with better
graphics, content, and tracking. They can also help
you build a following. That involves posting intelligent
messages-or status updates-and responding to
others by thanking, following, and friending others;
and commenting on their posts, etc.
Good content plus good interaction leads to a
growing base of followers. The third way in which a
social marketing provider can help you is by
designing and managing advertising campaigns on
social networks. That includes producing online
events and/or designing online promotions
49%
37%
9%
1% 4%
Social Media is Important
for My Business4
Strongly Agree Agree
Uncertain Disagree
Strongly Disagree
• Facebook
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Google+
• Pinterest
• Instagram
• Vine
• Quora
• Blogs
• YouTube
1. “Key Facts,” Facebook, June 2013.
2. “Twitter Statistics,” Statistic Brain, May 2013.
3. “Statistics,” YouTube, Aug. 2013.
4. “2013 Social Media Marketing Industry Report,” Michael Stelzner with Social Media Examiner, May 2013.

4. Email Marketing
Email is one of the most basic methods
of online marketing. For an email marketing
campaign to be successful, three basic things are
needed: a list of email addresses, a message, and
a delivery machine. When email first began being
used for marketing, it was easier to grab the
attention of subscribers. With so many businesses
now using this medium, it can be hard to stand out.
An email marketing company can help.
The advantages of email marketing are low cost
(no per-message fees like direct mail or fax, no
printing charges, no extra charges for images
or color); immediate delivery; ease of bulk-
mailing; the ability to embed hyperlinks in
messages; as well as the ability to respond
immediately to a call to action.
There are some disadvantages to email marketing,
though. First, the CAN-SPAM Act requires that
receivers opt-in to receive commercial email.
Companies that use direct mail can be fined if they
fail to follow the rules in the CAN-SPAM Act. The
fines can be quite steep (up to $500 per individual
message), and enforcement by those receiving
spam can be immediate.
Outsourcing your email marketing to a company
with a good reputation for facilitating email
communications with subscribers can help you stay
compliant with the CAN-SPAM Act and help with
mailing list management, email message creation,
message delivery and tracking.
For managing mailing lists with more than a few
hundred contacts, you're better off paying a fee of
$10 to $100 per month for Web-based services that
allow you to manage lists up to 10,000 contacts. For
lists with more than 10,000 contacts, you might
prefer to run your own mail-server software without
any limits on the number of message recipients or
messages per day.
While some advocate the death of email marketing,
71% of small businesses find the most value in email
marketing as a distribution channel and 64% of
marketers overall feel the same way5.
5. “Defining the Modern Marketer: SMBs Driving Results,”
BtoB Online, Aug. 2013.

5. Content and Multimedia Marketing
Content marketing is a fairly new tactic
that has gained popularity thanks to changes in
how search engines and social networks operate.
In early 2012, Google announced a change in the
way it would rank sites in search-engine results.
Google basically said it would no longer reward
sites that lacked quality, original content. Many
popular tricks that websites used to rank high for a
term were suddenly banished. This included ploys
such as buying links to make Google believe that a
particular site is popular, or using content "scraped"
from other sources to make Google think that a site
is bigger than it really is.
Content marketing is a form of inbound
marketing, where marketers look to earn their
audience’s attention organically instead of
through interruption.
Content marketing firms often generate content
designed to be used on other people's blogs,
websites, and social networks. This is sometimes
called shareable content, or viral content. The
content might comprise blog posts written for other
people's blogs, or guest articles for other websites.
The inbound links resulting from content on other
people's sites is valued very highly by Google. The
process of placing content on other people's sites
is often referred to as a link-building campaign.
The idea is to quickly build up a "link profile" that
Google rewards with a high search-engine rank.
There are number of content forms that can be
produced through an online marketing firm or, if you
have the available resources, in-house.
• Infographics or Images
• White papers and Case Studies
• Reports and Surveys
• Apps and/or Games
• Slideshows and Presentations
• Blog Posts and Social Media Content
Multimedia marketing is just one side of
content marketing-the visual side. In addition to
infographics, listed above, all kinds of files that
merge text, images, music, and video can be used to
create powerful online marketing campaigns. One of
the most common uses for multimedia marketing is
creating display ads for search marketing and online
advertising campaigns. Other forms of multimedia
marketing are audio files, podcasts, videos, live
streams and web-based seminars.
Marketers use podcasts to give timely audio reports
that people can listen to online, on their phones, or in
their cars. It's possible to attach one's brand to a
video that's already popular, or to create your own
videos and syndicate them yourself. Videos can be
inexpensively produced using almost any
smartphone or computer with a camera. Many
business offer webinars: live or canned Web-based
seminars that can be produced as audio or video
conference calls, and often feature interaction with a
live audience.

7. Summary
Online marketing provides businesses with the
opportunity to connect with a larger audience than
they could through more traditional tactics, and
often at a lower cost. This brief guide and
comprehensive checklist has provided you with the
information you need to evaluate the offers of
different Internet marketing providers. Having an
online presence is no longer an option; it’s a must
and an online marketing firm can get you on the
right track.
For more information about online marketing,
visit Business.com