Unless you're The Limited, Apple or Starbucks, it's safe to say that more people probably don't know your company than do know it.

So if your name isn't top of mind for someone who needs what you do, how do you get on their radar? The simple answer is "internet marketing." But internet marketing is not as simple to execute as you might think.

Google AdWords is the "Kleenex" of internet marketing because some folks use it as a generic term for digital marketing. But as you know, Google is just one of many search engines. And as you may NOT know, there are realistically hundreds, and unrealistically, thousands, of websites that also function as search engines. If you only want your ads to appear on Google, you use Google AdWords. If you want your ads to appear on multiple search engines, you use internet marketing.

For a quick overview, the article covers the following steps:

• Determining the keyword phrases that work for you, of which there are probably a handful that are the most searched for keyword terms for what you do. But did you know that you could actually use hundreds of keyword phrases that are relevant for your company? To find out why you would want to do that, you'd have to read the article.
• Decide on the geographic area you want to reach. If you're a home builder or plastic surgeon, maybe you want to reach people within 50 miles of your location. But if there are 1 to 3 million people in that area, that gets to be expensive, so it's time for a reality check when it comes to how far you want to reach.
• The budget, which is a mix of figuring out how many prospects you want to reach, the percentage of the searches you'd want to show up on for any given keyword phrase, and the number of phrases you want to appear under. You can reach 50% of the people doing those searches, or 90%. And of course, the more searches you show up for, the more it costs. (No surprise there.)
• The length of time you want your internet marketing campaign to run.
• Monitoring and measuring the results, and modify as needed. This is a not a "set it and forget it" marketing effort.

Because there are so many variables when it comes to internet marketing, you need the expertise of an internet marketing service to help you get the most out of it.

Because with internet marketing, like any marketing effort, there's a right way, and wrong way, to do it. And like any marketing effort, you can waste your money doing it wrong.

As a Columbus web design and marketing firm, we can't tell how often we've heard people say "Yeah, we tried (insert "social media, direct mail, email marketing, web design or SEO, etc.), and it didn't work for us."

Of course, when we ask the right questions, we easily find out the reason it didn't work, and almost always it's because they went about it wrong. Think about your process, and about the right and wrong ways to go about doing what you do. We suspect you can say the same thing to your customers when it comes to what you offer.

If you'd like to learn more about how to go about internet (or digital) marketing the right way, we should talk!