Technology Isn't Changing Advertising Costs

Marketing and advertising agencies that can help a client to understand and penetrate its market have traditionally collected huge fees for driving sales. Companies that use advertising have gotten used to paying those fees, and agencies have gotten used to collecting them. So even though new technologies are dramatically reducing the real cost of marketing and advertising, the biggest agencies don't provide affordable SEO services to their clients.

Marketing and advertising are essentially about getting people's promotion. If you want to get the attention of a kid in a playground, you first find out his name (marketing) and then you shout it as loud as you can (advertising) until he responds. Marketers have traditionally gathered information from the market, and advertisers have used that information to figure out how to grab that market's attention.

Under the traditional model, getting attention was about creating a sensation of connectedness with the product. For example, advertisers have used celebrities who are already popular in their target market. They have created advertising campaigns that ape or incorporate the music, movies and television shows that are popular with the market. And of course, getting a laugh is always a good way to draw people in.

Any of those methods don't come cheap, however. A good comedy writer who can find the laugh that will attract the market can charge a lot for his talents. The production values of top TV shows and movies require a lot of money to emulate. And hiring a celebrity to endorse your product requires a celebrity-sized paycheck, while licensing a popular song for a commercial can cost more than the rest of production all together.

Similarly, the traditional methods of marketing are expensive. Market research studies done the old-fashioned way involve finding enough people to make a statistically significant valid sample, asking them a bunch of questions, and then analyzing their answers to determine trends that mean something to the advertising effort. That statistically valid sample can easily mean thousands of people, all of whom have to be incented somehow to participate, adding further expense.

Once a campaign has been explored, researched, created, and produced, it still has to be delivered to the market through some mechanism. Deploying an ad campaign usually costs far more than creating and producing it, including buying air time on TV and radio, print advertising in magazines and newspapers, and potentially even outdoor advertising.

Effective search engine optimization operates on a completely different paradigm. It's more about data, creating systems behind the scenes that make a company's Website more visible to search engines, improving ranking results. Even after seeing advertising, a huge percentage of the population begins a buying process with an Internet search, so the winners on search engine rankings are likely to be the winners in sales as well, regardless of other advertising.

Client companies, however, are still used to paying the kind of fees that marketing and advertising companies have charged under the traditional model. The agencies aren't about to give up that kind of money just because the delivery process is cheaper. So instead of charging less, many of them tend to make search engine optimization seem magical and charge high rates for it. As a result, even though affordable SEO services should be plentiful, they can be frustratingly hard for a smaller business to find.

I'm a web optimization professional specializing in affordable SEO services. For more resources and information, check out AudienceBloom.