Internet marketing (online marketing) is one of the rapidly growing branches of marketing. It is aimed at promoting the company’s products and creating a positive image via the Internet.
Forms of Online Marketing
Promoting products and establishing contact with customers on the Internet is carried out using various methods. The most popular events include:
Newsletters – that is, nothing more than advertising services by sending emails to potential clients. Internet advertising began with email, and this method is still relevant today.
Social networks – a profile on websites is now almost a duty. Activity on social networks is one of the most effective forms of contact with customers. By observing the pages of large companies, you can see how quickly employees respond to customer requests, problems or suggestions. Additionally, social media is a great place to promote your services or products.
Website positioning – how high a site appears in browser results is a factor that directly determines sales results. According to the study, almost all traffic from search queries comes from sites that are on the first page of results. Therefore, it is very important to rank as high as possible for industry-related keywords.
Google AdWords is the purchase of advertising space in the Google search engine. This service allows you to display advertisements in a specific location in response to a user’s search query. This is an alternative for website positioning.
Blog – more and more often you can come across corporate blogs maintained by company employees. This is an additional alternative to a social media page. The best results come from a combination of these two methods. Often companies choose to collaborate with well-known bloggers, at least by sending free products for reviews or advertising tests.
PPC advertising – most often takes the form of purchasing paid space. The buyer pays the owner of this page for each click on the advertising banner. You can purchase such a service on any website that is connected to a specific advertising service. The best results are obtained by advertising on sites directly related to the industry in which the company operates. Too much divergence in subject matter will result in users not paying attention to advertisements for a product or service from a completely different area.
Every company that is struggling with underperforming sales or needs to improve its image should take an interest in internet marketing. The Internet allows you to advertise almost every service and product, regardless of what industry the company operates in.
Digital Marketing Tools
The main tool of Internet marketing is promotion using content. As a rule, advertising campaigns in contextual or targeted advertising (these are also Internet marketing tools) are carried out periodically, but content promotion is a constant story.
There are many tools for content promotion:
Website The semantic content of the company’s website is both about promoting the site through the SEO component, and about retaining visitors due to the quality of the content.
Blog with original content It is fashionable to maintain your own blog today; Both companies and individual specialists willingly do this. On a blog you can show your competencies, talk about your product, share stories from your life, and answer readers’ questions.
Publications on third-party sites. Expert articles, detailed comments, interviews, cases – all this works for promotion on the Internet if the sites are chosen correctly.
Email marketing A popular Internet marketing tool and a working method of promotion. Chains of letters warm up new customers and work to increase their loyalty, bringing back “dormant” and departed customers.
Content of social networks. Today it makes sense for any company that needs clients to go to social networks, and first of all those who work in the B2C segment. On social networks they form their own loyal community, engage, entertain, and sell, reducing the distance between the seller and the buyer. There is simply no Internet marketing today without SMM – concrete plants, soda and heavy equipment manufacturers; funeral agencies… Everyone is present on social networks.
Visual content These are photographs, pictures, gifs, infographics. Everything that helps stop a person from running around a virtual page and attracts his attention.
Video content. On YouTube alone, visitors watch about a billion hours of video every day – it would be reckless not to take advantage of the interest in this type of content.
Presentations. Presentations can be posted on the website, sent by email, or used during live performances.
SEO content. By optimizing blog articles and website texts, you promote content to good positions in search results – and this is one of the tasks of Internet marketing.
Messages in instant messengers. Messengers are most often used as chatbots or online consultants on a website. Using instant messengers, you can send newsletters and launch competitions and other promotions.
Influence marketing, or native advertising with bloggers. The importance and demand for this type of content is increasing year by year; Influencers are becoming an increasingly influential force in the online promotion of goods, brands, and services.
Messengers as a separate marketing tool
We are all used to the fact that Internet marketing tools are landing pages, e-mail marketing, SEO, SMM, targeted advertising and content marketing. However, there is also messenger marketing – a relatively new tool for communicating with clients and selling for businesses. Chats, chatbots, mailings and auto funnels – the company will receive 10 times more leads and reduce the cost of a paying client by 5-20 times if all these tools are configured correctly.
Why does a business need to implement messengers into its work, and not just use familiar tools?
The effectiveness of messengers is higher than standard sales channels:
- the open rate of messages in them is 5 times higher than in email.
- messengers do not have a smart feed, which reduces reach, as in social networks.
- In instant messengers you don’t need to set up paid advertising – a chatbot can warm up the client. It will send the subscriber useful materials, bonuses, discounts, etc.
It’s convenient and familiar for people to communicate using messengers, so for business it’s an effective sales channel that can no longer be ignored.
Comprehensive Internet marketing
In 2021, the concept of “internet marketing” has gone far beyond the simple use of channels.
About 10 years ago, the term “banner blindness” became widespread – a condition in which the human eye does not perceive advertising blocks; now the term “manipulative rejection” is gaining popularity. Some people begin to react extremely sharply to advertising techniques that set their teeth on edge.
These changes and the constant emergence of new techniques and distribution channels have seriously changed the approach to integrated Internet marketing.
When developing a truly serious advertising campaign, you will always go through the following stages:
- Audience research – you need to understand who the real audience of your brand/product/service is. In our work, we often encounter a serious gap between the “target audience” in the client’s mind and real consumers.
- Research into information consumption channels is a very important step that many people skip. You need to clearly understand where your audience consumes information.
- Deep analytics of the competitive market – you may think that the store next door is your main competitor, but in the online space this may not be the case. Many Internet marketing channels work on the principle of an auction “for the user’s attention,” and the user can have a large number of interests. If you love France, fresh bread and German cars, travel companies, bakeries and car manufacturers will compete for you. It seems that the bakery has very little chance in this battle.
- Creating a concept – during this stage, you not only choose the main message of your advertising campaign, but also select the channels through which you can deliver your message to the target audience.
- Production. It doesn’t matter what kind of advertising campaign you launch and what channels you use. In any case, you need to produce something. Write this article, draw a banner, select a picture and text for a post on a social network, create a campaign in the advertising account, etc.
- Implementation. In my practice, I have seen more than 3,500 advertising campaigns, both in Russia and in Europe. According to my statistics, 8 out of 10 campaigns require significant adjustments at the implementation stage. In online marketing, you can’t just hang a banner and wait, track results in real time and make changes.
- Analytics. The more complex your advertising campaign, the more data will be available to you. The data you receive can be of great value to your business.
- Delayed activities. In most cases, after analytical reports, the campaign is considered implemented, but in reality it is not so. One manufacturer of child car seats conducted an advertising campaign and received unsatisfactory initial results; it turned out that most of the people who were targeted by its advertising had already bought a child car seat. The audience collected in this way was re-processed after a period of time and the repeated advertising campaign recouped all the invested costs and brought huge profits. The secret of the success of the repeated campaign is that as the child grows up, we have to change several car seats, and if in the first advertising campaign we found out “when” they bought their first seat, then in the second advertising campaign we knew exactly “what” and “when” offer.
Comprehensive Internet marketing includes not only these points, but also what is called “hygienic activities”, such as working with reviews, maintaining social networks, publications in online magazines, but this is the topic of a completely different article.
Books on Online Marketing
- Scott Brinker – Agile marketing in the digital sphere
- John Jantsch – How to get people recommending you again and again
- Benji Rabhan – A Guide to Creating a Strong Marketing Plan
- Dan Zarrella – Scientific Research on Social Marketing
- Brad Geddes – Advanced Course on Google AdWords
- John Wubben – Principles of Effective Content Marketing
- Robert Rose and Joe Pulizzi – The Ultimate Guide to Content Marketing
- Lee Odden – Selling content
- Jim Cockrum – Internet Marketing: The Best Free Tools
- Dmitry Kot – E-mail marketing
- Emanuel Rosen – Anatomy of word of mouth marketing
- Hyatt Michael – Platform: how to become visible on the Internet
- Jason Falls and Eric Deckers – Social Media Marketing
- Khalid Saleh and Ayat Shukairi – Increasing website conversion
- Tim Ash – Improving the effectiveness of online advertising
