Preface to Online Marketing
Online marketing is advertising and marketing the products or services of a business over Internet. Online marketing relies upon websites or emails to reach to the users and it is combined with e-commerce to facilitate the business transactions.
Marketing is carried out with the intent of reaching out to a maximum number of people in exchange of minimum cost. When Internet was still in its formative years, marketing people used to depend on traditional media such as television, radio, handbills, billboards, newspapers, and magazines.
Today, the Internet is premium source for promoting your business. There has been a rapid rise in the number of internet users since last few years. Thus Internet is the lucrative place to promote the business.
What is Marketing?
As defined by the American Marketing Association, “marketing is the activity, set of institutions and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offers that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large”.
Marketing changes the perspective of a person. There are two approaches of marketing −
- Traditional marketing
- Online marketing
What is Online Marketing?
Online marketing is advertising and marketing the products or services of a business over Internet.
Online marketing relies upon websites or emails to reach to the users and it is combined with e-commerce to facilitate the business transactions. In online marketing, you can promote the products and services via websites, blogs, email, social media, forums, and mobile Apps.
Online marketing is also termed as Internet marketing, Web marketing, or simply, OLM.
Difference between Traditional and Online Marketing
The goal of traditional marketing and online marketing are same − To attract and drive visitors of advertise to buy the product thereby increasing the business profit. Let us see the difference between two approaches now −
| Traditional Marketing | Online Marketing |
|---|---|
| It is difficult to measure. You cannot know how many people read your advertise and how many took favorable action upon viewing it. | It is measurable. You can know the number of people who viewed the online advertise, and the number of ones who purchased the product. |
| It is not cost-effective. | It is more cost-effective. |
| It is not so good for brand building. | It is fast and efficient for brand building. |
| In some way, it interrupts regular activities of users such as television advertises interrupt the program you are watching, billboards divert focus of the driver, etc. | It is not interrupting. The user can attend online advertises as per his/her convenience and preferences. |
| It may leave users’ queries unanswered as printing or narrating complete information about the product or service may not be always feasible. | It can provide maximum information about the product or service, offers, and transactions. |
Online marketing is widely practiced strategy of advertising or promoting sales and name of the business. Wise use of the online marketing strategies can take the business to unprecedented levels of success.
Components of Online Marketing
Market Research
Business organizations need to set clear objectives and strong market understanding. To research the market, you can −
- Review your website traffic.
- Review the Ad conversion rates.
- Review the queries asked by your existing customers.
- Identify the customers’ pain points that they post on various platforms such as yahoo answers, blogs, social media, and other sites.
- Anticipate and compile a list of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) with their clear answers and align them to customers’ pain points.
- Include the fact sheet about product if required.
Keyword Research
Choosing a correct and relevant set of keywords can help design a crisp and persuasive advertise for online marketing. Before accessing any keyword research tool, ask yourself −
- What is the purpose of this web page?
- How clearly can I state the conversion event?
- Have I clearly answered all the pain points that users might look for on this page?
- Which phrases the users might enter while looking for a solution?
- Are my keywords relevant to the users’ intent?
SEO Friendly Website
Mapping the right keywords around the users’ pain points in a hierarchical manner makes an effective website. You need to categorize the keywords in a thematic order and then link the respective articles to the keywords. This makes the website easy maintain.
Web Analytics
The ultimate goal of analytics is to identify actionable insights on monthly basis which can help to make favorable changes to the website gradually. This in turn ultimately leads to strong profits in long term.
Online Advertising
It is placing crisp, simple, and tempting Ads on the websites to attract the viewers’ attention and developing viewers’ interest in the product or service.
Mobile Advertising
It is creating awareness about the business and promoting it on smart phones that people carry with them inseparably.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
It is the activity of optimizing web pages or complete website in order to make them search engine friendly, thus getting higher position in the search results. It contributes to overall rankings of the keywords through influencing factors such as appropriate titles, meta descriptions, website speed, links, etc.
Social Media Marketing
It includes creating profiles of your brand on social media platforms such as Google Plus, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook, etc. It assures that you remain connected to the existing or potential customers, build awareness about the products and services, create interest in and desire to buy your product, and interact with the customers on their own terms and convenience.
Email Marketing
You can interact with the customers to answer their queries using automatic responders and enhance the customer experience with your website.
You can offer the options such as signing-in to subscribe to your newsletter. You can make the emails catchy and crisp, so that they don’t make recipients annoyed. Also, you can use selected best words in the subject line to boost the open rate.
Content Marketing
It includes creation and sharing of media and publishing the content in order to acquire and retain customers.
Blogs
Blogs are web pages created by an individual or a group of individuals. They are updated on a regular basis. You can write blogs for business promotion.
Banners
Banners are long strips of cloth with a slogan or design. They are carried for demonstration, procession, or hung in a public place. There are internet banners in parallel to tangible banners for advertising.
Internet Forums
They are nothing but message boards of online discussion websites, where people posts messages and engage into conversation.