Internet marketing, also known as e-marketing and online marketing is the promotion and marketing of services or products solely over the World Wide Web. Although internet marketing only consisted of placing banner advertisements on websites at first, today, there are many internet marketing strategies varying from PPC (Pay per click) advertisements, CPI (Cost per impression) advertisements, email marketing and referral marketing to SEO (search engine optimization). In addition, the most recently empower internet marketing tactic is social media marketing. At present, internet marketing is considered as one of the key aspects of e-commerce, and is becoming a main component of the marketing strategy in almost every company.
What makes internet marketing so important?
Today, the Internet possesses the ability of connecting millions of people from every corner of the globe. As a result, it can also bring millions of customers within your target market to your business regardless of the physical location of the business. In addition, internet marketing is highly cost effective when compared to most of the other traditional promotional efforts. And unlike when using traditional marketing strategies, it is really easy to measure and analyze the effectiveness of your internet marketing campaigns using various web analytics and ROI (Return on investment) analysis tools. This makes it easy for you to alter your marketing methods as soon as you realize that they are not delivering the expected results.
Objectives of internet marketing
Basically, internet marketing is performing one or more of the following via the Internet.
- Get the message of a company about itself, its products, or the services it offer online.
- Carrying out market research about the nature (needs, preferences, demographics, etc.) of current and prospective customers.
- Selling products, advertising space, or services using the Internet.
Components of Internet Marketing
Putting up a website on the internet is the first step of any internet marketing campaign. Your website should contain text and images (also audio and video if possible) to deliver the message of the company. It can be used to inform the existing and prospective customers about the benefits and features of the products or services that your company is providing. It does not matter whether it includes the features to sell products or services online or to capture potential business leads. You can use it as an online brochure to simply give your business a presence on the Internet. Then you can use any of the following methods (or all of them simultaneously) to promote your online presence.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is one of the main components of internet marketing. Simply put, SEM is marketing or promoting a website through the search engines. There are two main SEM strategies; search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine advertizing. Search engine optimizing is improving the visibility of a website to the search engines by employing various SEO techniques in order to boost the number of visitors the website receives via search engines by ranking high for search queries for the relevant keywords. Search engine advertizing is placing various PPC, CPI advertisements on search engines or paying for spots on pay-for-inclusion (PFI) website directories that can be considered as online yellow page listings.
Banner advertising is one of the oldest internet marketing techniques, which is simply paying for advertising space on a website. It is similar to posting ads in classifieds or newspapers.
Email marketing is also another old but still pertinent component of internet marketing. As the name suggests, it means using emails to distribute information about a service or product, or to get feedback from the customers. While the email addresses of existing customers are usually collected via an online registration process, email addresses of prospective customers can be also purchased online.
The most recent development of internet marketing is social media marketing, which is using social networking and social bookmarking websites such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, and Digg, to find prospective customers and to communicate with the existing customers.
About the author: Eric Lewis is an experienced blogger in various fields. He loves writing articles about keyword research and SEO. Follow him on Google+.
