Even though 2009 is widely expected to be a year of crisis, for many companies it may go down in history as a year of success, development and rapidly growing sales. This mainly applies to agencies dealing with internet promotion and companies that know exactly how to take advantage of the marketing opportunities offered by the web.

What makes the internet the key to success and why now? Take e- commerce. Growing numbers of people are becoming aware of the comfort and safety of buying goods online. The range of products available online is in many cases larger than that available in conventional stores. Last but not least, online shopping is simply cheaper, which is particularly important at a time of crisis.

Why is this so? Companies that sell their products and services via the internet can rationalize costs much more efficiently than others-and not only because they do not need to rent space for customer service. The cost of reaching customers is notably lower and the return on investment higher for online advertising than any other kind of advertising. Internet users who search the web for information on products they are interested in usually go to search engines and so the best sales are achieved by businesses whose website addresses are shown at the top of the search result page.

The whole range of efforts to push a company as high up in the search results as possible is known as web positioning or search engine optimization (SEO) and is one of the most promising ways of internet promotion. In the West, marketing via search engines constitutes the largest part of the online advertising market.A vital part in web positioning is played by tools measuring the effects of e-campaigns.

Geolocation, for example, provides the advertiser with information on cities that internet users who click on online advertisements come from. The click-through rate (CTR) is the ratio of clicks per ad link to the number of times the advertised web page gets opened.

A low CTR shows that some marketing tool has been neglected and needs to be taken greater care of. But what if the CTR is high, but visitors leave the website quickly? They might just feel disappointed by the contents, or the website is unclear and not functional. Web statistics and website audits offer a wealth of knowledge on potential customers, their habits and attitudes. Those managing companies that market their products and services online are becoming increasingly aware of this. Their needs are catered to by new agencies that deal with e-marketing, which includes both website audits, to determine website usefulness, and search engine optimization. Some agencies offer training in web positioning, because aware of the efficiency of SEO, more companies are coming to the conclusion that training a staff member pays off better than outsourcing web positioning to an outside agency. There is more to internet promotion than web positioning, however. To a lot of managers, TV advertising is a dream impossible to fulfill, as the very cost of airing a TV commercial would exceed their companies' entire annual budgets.

But how about playing a commercial... for free? The web community will do it for you, just make sure you share with them an amusing or a controversial video, never mind the quality. It is the content, not the quality, that can suddenly make a random, amateur video a hot topic for millions of internet users. This brilliant idea has only occurred to one company in Poland so far! A video intended especially for the internet and made for a well-known yogurt producer has been seen by almost 1 million people! This year will be a successful one for those who know how to take advantage of this new trend in consumer habits. While some will only be discovering the significance of web positioning, others will be training their staff in SEO in order to achieve an even higher return on their investments. The pioneers are sure to have us startled with a host of controversial commercials on YouTube.com-which is exactly what they hope to achieve.

Bartłomiej Zobek
Katarzyna Wojtusik

www.eurobrand.pl