Online marketing
Definition
What is online marketing?
Online marketing is a method or process used to spread a message about an entrepreneur’s products, or services to its potential customers. Online marketing helps a business raise its brand awareness by establishing its online presence all over the internet.
Email marketing, social media, search engine optimization, and website publishing are some examples of methods and techniques used for online marketing.
The objective of online marketing is to reach potential customers through different channels where they can spend their time reading, searching, shopping, and more.
There are techniques companies use – primarily through digital mediums – to attract, engage, and convert virtual visitors to satisfied customers.
Advantages of online marketing
Here are some key advantages of doing online marketing:
- Online marketing establishes relationships with new clients and strengthens relationships with regular customers.
- Online marketing empowers your brand to target a highly specific niche. It delivers your message to a wide audience that will hopefully avail of your products and services.
- Online marketing is inexpensive. Companies don’t have to pay for printing to distribute materials.
- Online marketing allows you to reach more potential customers without setting up stalls and booths.
- Online marketing gives you the freedom to keep your enterprise open 24/7 without having to worry about working your employees overtime.
Types of online marketing
There are many types of online marketing. However, these are methods that see success often.
Search engine marketing
Search engine marketing is all about getting your website to appear at the top of the result page when someone searches for relevant words and phrases related to your brand.
Search engine marketing statistics can provide feedback on the effectiveness of your advertising. It gives an indication of how appealing visitors find your ad to be. The more appealing it is, the more likely they are to click through.
Search engine optimization, on the other hand, is the process of maximizing the number of visitors on the website by ensuring that the site appears high on the list of results returned by a search engine.
Email marketing
Email marketing is the act of sending out a newsletter and customized product or service offerings specific to the customer’s needs. Companies can also keep their customers up-to-date with upcoming events, and special offerings.
It is one of the highly effective strategies for sending emails to potential customers and regular clients.
In addition, email marketing is a very effective way to reach potential customers who may be interested in your products or service. Your emails arrive in their inbox where they are likely to see it.
Social media marketing
The use of social media platforms to connect with your audience to build your brand and increase sales is what we call social media marketing.
Social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, and Facebook are all opportunities for online marketing. A brand’s unique content should be tailored to a specific platform to help increase brand awareness.
Instead of broadcasting messages out to a mass audience, you can use social media platforms to interact with customers.
Content marketing
Content marketing involves the creation and sharing of online material like videos and social media posts that are intended to show interest in your business’s products or services.
Content marketing involves creating and distributing content like text, pictures, multimedia that adds value for your audience, instead of just broadcasting an advertising message.
If you’re in B2C (business to consumer), your content can be on social media posts, blog articles, and exciting videos. If you’re in B2B (business to business), producing white papers, webinars, and educational videos as content will get you far.