When CJ Hueston started Corporate Dimensions Inc. in 1998, she knew she would need some type of online presence, even though her Naples-based executive recruitment company was hardly a dot-com business. These days, even the most traditional businesses find tremendous value in marketing themselves in non-traditional Internet venues.

CDI started out with a simple Web site. “We didn’t know if we would be able to funnel traffic to the site so we were pretty elementary about it,” says Hueston. “It was just a presence. We were not doing anything else with it.” The site turned out to be successful in drawing traffic. “It gave us a lot of visibility and name recognition.”

Based on that initial success, Hueston decided about a year ago to overhaul the site completely, giving it a more sophisticated look and making it more interactive, providing visitors with a way to communicate with the company through e-mail and by filling out forms. The redesigned site has seen a good 20 percent increase in traffic, according to Hueston. “It brings us more activity, which gives us more potential for business.”

At the same time, Hueston also started placing banner ads and links to the CDI site as part of an overall online marketing campaign. The Internet is as important as traditional forms of advertising to the success of her business. “I see it as a fantastic marketing tool,” says Hueston of the Internet. “It’s a great reaching-out tool.” She estimates that at least half of her total marketing budget now goes to online marketing.

Businesses of all types are anxious to get their message to the 140-million-plus online audience. The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) reports that online advertising revenues for 2000 in the United States were $8.2 billion. According to some estimates, this accounts for 10 percent of all ad spending. Growth in the last two quarters of 2000 slowed to about 9 percent, reflecting the slowdown in the economy, says the IAB. As some of the dot-com companies have fallen by the wayside, however, many more traditional companies are seeing the potential of online marketing. Those are the companies now driving the growth in Internet advertising.

Many businesses have already replaced their old paper brochures with a Web site. Hueston sees her company heading in that direction. “The days of really expensive brochures with reams of information is not where we are going,” she says. She still sees a place for simple paper brochures — for example, at trade shows where you want to hand a piece of paper to a potential customer, or for those people who are still uncomfortable going online. For all intents and purposes, however, at many companies the Web site has become an electronic brochure.

“How can anybody today survive without a Web site?” asks Hueston. “It is the best way for a company to have a marketing presence and set itself apart from the competition.”

Without a broader online campaign behind it, however, a Web site will float aimlessly in cyberspace. Launching a Web site is only the first step in an Internet marketing campaign. Such a campaign can consist of many parts. Those receiving the most attention these days are search engines, banner ads, links, and e-mail marketing. Most businesses will find that using a combination of these approaches works best.

Search Engines

Once a Web site is up and running, the next step a company usually takes is to position itself on the major search engines. Market research indicates that 85 percent of consumers begin their Web browsing with a search engine. But snagging a good spot on a search engine is getting harder — and more expensive — all the time. It takes continual oversight to maintain a position based on keywords and carefully chosen meta tags (code embedded in a Web site to aid search engines).

Staying at the head of the search engine class used to just mean vigilance and some clever coding. Now the engines are beginning to charge for premium positions. Yahoo, for example, now lists five paid sites before the rest of its results. MSN, Excite, and several others are also exacting a fee for featured positions in search results.

At CDI, Hueston contracts with a company to monitor the search engines, but, she adds, “it is quite costly to stay on top of the search engine pile.”

Banner Ads and Links

Though still quite popular, banner ads have fallen a bit out of favor. Consumers complain they are annoying and intrusive. Businesses question their effectiveness. Many advertisers thought the so-called click-through rates were too low for the cost of the ads. In response, the industry came up with a different fee model known as cost per click. In this model, the advertiser pays a small fee only when someone clicks on the banner. This differs from the traditional cost structure in which the advertiser paid a set fee for 1,000 banner impressions, regardless of how many click-throughs occurred.

Strategically placed, banner ads and links can be quite effective. CDI runs banner ads on different industry sites and places links with various professional organizations, such as the Chamber of Commerce. Hueston is happy with the results. “Banners and links are so worth the money,” she says.

E-mail Marketing

The hottest online marketing technique at the moment is targeted e-mail. This is especially popular with electronic retailers, as anyone who has ordered from an online catalog company probably knows. Soon after placing an order with Pottery Barn, Eddie Bauer, or fogdog.com, for example, customers will begin to receive special offers via e-mail. Market researcher Forrester Research estimates that 10 percent of the recipients actually do respond to these e-mail offers. Those who don’t want to receive the e-mails can opt out.

The line between this form of e-mail marketing and junk e-mail, or spam, is a fine one. The distinction between the two is in the willingness of the recipients to receive the e-mail. In opt-in e-mail marketing, recipients have agreed to receive marketing messages. Recipients of spam have no such agreement. Some companies shy away from e-mail marketing for this reason. Hueston, for example, has tried it, but without much success. Her customers, she says, don’t really like to be hit with e-mail promotions.

Obviously, not all forms of online marketing work for every company. As with traditional advertising, it takes some experimentation to decide what is effective and what isn’t. Without a doubt, however, online marketing has to be part of the whole advertising package.

Susan Holly is a freelance writer based on Sanibel Island.