Internet marketing, adhering to its name, refers to advertising, promoting or selling your product/ services through the internet. Internet marketing involves usage of web sites and e-mails for all promotional communications. It includes search engine marketing, pay per click advertising, blogs, e-mail marketing and more.
Thus, successful internet marketing would mean increased traffic and return of investment (ROI) on your website. Strategically planned internet marketing ideally involves good search engine and social media optimization.
Benefits of Internet Marketing
- Overcomes geographical limitations: Internet knows no boundaries; your product/service is available to all, increasing the number of potential customers across the world.
- 24 X 7: Your website is available at any given time; this flexibility in time increases its accessibility as compared to a normal store.
- Usage of different advertising media: You can integrate audio, video, blogs and make advertising more interactive unlike in print or television/radio.
- Cost effective: Web services being the only requirement, internet marketing becomes more cost-effective; you save on travel and other advertising gimmicks like trade fairs, hoardings etc.
- Complete display of information: No constraint of time and space allows you to display robust and diverse information.
- Greater return on investment (ROI): A search engine/social media optimized website attracts huge prospective customers increasing the traffic and eventually accrue conversions. This builds up the return on investment, making Internet Marketing a lucrative choice.
- Attracts wider audience: Internet marketing attracts a range of audience who demand diversified services from your website. These services not only include buying of product but also information for research, job search, new business leads, capital investment plans etc.
Different types of Internet Marketing
As the new age marketing tool, Internet Marketing is a cheaper way of publicity even for small scale industries. Some internet marketing methods are-
- Search Engine Marketing: Search Engine Marketing (SEM) includes managing pay per click campaigns and banner ads by increasing the web page ranking and optimizing the website content to make it crawler friendly.
- Pay-per-Click Advertising: In pay per click (PPC), the advertiser pays some amount to the search engine for his ad to be displayed if a keyword related to his business is searched for. These clicks and eventual transactions become the revenue earners.
- Social Media Marketing: A new method of internet marketing; it allows you to use various social networks like Facebook and MySpace for all promotional activities. This informal approach has a wider reach providing a new leap to the business prospects.
- E-mail Marketing: The website owner maintains a subscriber database and uses that to send personalized newsletter thus creating a one-to-one bonding with a prospective customer.
Internet-Marketing Boosters
In today’s competitive market, a constant strive towards betterment is the business strategy motto. A few key energizers to successful online marketing could be-
- Creating online blogs which could include guest and community blogging
- Improving the quality content with good emphasis on real life implications
- Promotional contests like quizzes or e-book circulation
- Effective press releases with updated reviews
- Posting client testimony as a polite declaration of the successful venture
- Prospective customer/ visitor feedback; it acts as an intelligent input for improvising the marketing effort
