What Is Online Marketing?
Online marketing is the practice of leveraging web-based channels to spread a message about a companys brand, products, or services to its potential customers. The methods and techniques used for online marketing include email, social media, display advertising, search engine optimization, and more. The objective of marketing is to reach potential customers through the channels where they spend time reading, searching, shopping, or socializing online.
Widespread adoption of the Internet for business and personal use has generated many new channels for advertising and marketing engagement, including those mentioned above. There are also many benefits and challenges inherent with online marketing, which uses primarily digital mediums to attract, engage, and convert virtual visitors to customers.
Online marketing differs from traditional marketing, which has historically included mediums like print, billboard, television and radio advertisements.
Before online marketing channels emerged, the cost to market products or services was often prohibitively expensive, and traditionally difficult to measure. Think of national television ad campaigns, which are measured through consumer focus groups to determine levels of brand awareness. These methods are also not well-suited to controlled experimentation. Today, anyone with an online business (as well as most offline businesses) can participate in online marketing by creating a website and building customer acquisition campaigns at little to no cost. Those marketing products and services also have the ability to experiment with optimization to fine-tune their campaigns efficiency and ROI.
A key benefit of using online channels for marketing a business or product is the ability to measure the impact of any given channel, as well as how visitors acquired through different channels interact with a website or landing page experience. Of the visitors that convert into paying customers, further analysis can be done to determine which channels are most effective at acquiring valuable customers.
Analytics for web or mobile app experiences can help determine the following:
There are a number of tools that can be used to build and maintain a robust online marketing program:
Some examples of online marketing campaigns include:
Although online marketing creates many opportunities for businesses to grow their presence via the Internet and build their audiences, there are also inherent challenges with these methods of marketing. First, the marketing can become impersonal, due to the virtual nature of message and content delivery to a desired audience. Marketers must inform their strategy for online marketing with a strong understanding of their customers needs and preferences. Techniques like surveys, user testing, and in-person conversations can be used for this purpose.
Online marketing can also be crowded and competitive. Although the opportunities to provide goods and services in both local and far-reaching markets is empowering, the competition can be significant. Companies investing in online marketing may find visitors attention is difficult to capture due to the number of business also marketing their products and services online. Marketers must develop a balance of building a unique value proposition and brand voice as they test and build marketing campaigns on various channels.
The first step to getting started with online marketing is to evaluate your goals and make sure they are measurable. Are you hoping to sign up 100 new customers? Generate 1,000 leads to fuel your B2B sales process? Build an email subscriber base of 10,000 people?
After that, you need to make a choice about how to construct an online presence that helps you achieve that goal. Maybe you need to set up an e-commerce site. If youre interested in publishing content to drive awareness and subscribers, look into setting up a blog. A simple website or landing page with a lead capture form can help you start developing your brand and generating traffic. A basic analytics platform (like Google Analytics, which is free) can help you start to measure how you are tracking towards your initial goal.
Online marketing is also known as Internet marketing, web marketing, digital marketing and search engine marketing (SEM). Online advertising and Internet advertising are one technique involved with online marketing, but are not synonymous with online marketing.
Excerpt from:
Online Marketing - Optimizely