In truth, the Internet is the Frontier for marketing and has been for the last decade. Surprisingly, however, many businesses continue to dismiss its usefulness as an advertising and marketing outlet, frontiernews or at least feel they don’t have the resources to tap into it. And therein lies the problem.

The number one mistake small businesses make is assuming the Internet does not apply to their product or service. The web is not just for those ‘big players’, or for those companies that attract a national customer/consumer base, like travel or real estate industries. Potential customers are looking for your business now – no matter how localized it is – and statistics show their numbers are growing daily. If your business doesn’t have a presence online, localletter you’re invisible to them.

Today, the Internet and all that it entails – websites, email, banner ads, social networking, ecommerce, widgets, desktop applications, mobile marketing, viral video – and the 240 million Americans it connects is the single most visited medium for research and shopping in the United States. If you have avoided interactive marketing in your business’s overall brand and marketing plan and still made it, you’re lucky. newspoke But your luck may be running out.

Here are some statistics that may change the way you look at your marketing plan:

– Over 80% of Americans have Internet access, 57% of which (approximately 137 million people) use it specifically for researching a business, topicals product, or service, and then buying that product or service. Approximately 957 million people worldwide (as of Sept, 2005) have access to the World Wide Web.

– The Internet Advertising Bureau Revenue Report states that in the first half of 2007, US businesses spent $10 billion on interactive advertising, tbadaily up 27% from last year.

– According to studies, interactive ad spend in the US will continue to increase every year by more than 10% for the next four years.

– Ad spend in traditional print media outlets (due in large part to the declining of readership numbers) has decreased in some sectors over the last decade by nearly 20%. kulfiy

– Google, the leading search engine in a group of five global search engines (Yahoo, Baidu, Microsoft, Naver), is responsible for more than a half a trillion searches a year worldwide.

There’s proof in numbers. The Internet, and all of its interactive elements and qualities, will continue to grow as a relevant medium for Americans (and the World for that matter) to search for news, information, entertainment, and of course – products and services. pressmagazines

Internet access in the United States is virtually everywhere. And due to its integration in a wide spectrum of technologies, the Internet is portable and convenient; and Internet advertising is not only affordable, its relevancy and success are easily tracked. Best of all, the Internet is the great equalizer. It levels the playing field from the mom and pop grocery store to the multi-national corporation. Even the smallest of businesses can post the same – if not greater – ROI than the biggest players in business.