Mediaboss Marketing

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

Forbes

SEO Vs. PPC: Pros, Cons And A Holistic Approach To Search Forbes Attorneys are bombarded with information about digital marketing. To break through all of the information online, lawyers know having a strong digital presence is essential if they want to remain competitive. Paid and organic search are two popular ... and more »

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SEO Vs. PPC: Pros, Cons And A Holistic Approach To Search - Forbes

For many legal professionals, internet marketing is a key element in their strategy to generate new business. One typical approach to internet marketing is simply tracking inquiries and website visits based on Google Analytics data. That is true whether we are talking about attorneys, litigation financiers, expert witnesses, or others. Yet such an approach misses a key point in marketing not all inquiries are created equal.

In fact, many legal professionals have a variety of inquiries that come to them. Some are new customers, others are customer service requests, background research by industry participants, accidental or erroneous inquiries, etc. Most of the time, its difficult for businesses to determine what type of inquiries come from what sources. In other words, businesses often lack effective tools for lead validation. Thats true in both the business of law and in other industries.

Different facets of the legal industry are at different stages in terms of marketing. While firms like LexisNexis offer outstanding backend services enabling practice management for attorneys, small ancillary industries have nothing comparable. In litigation finance, for instance, Mighty.com offers the best platform for investment management, but the platform still leaves significant white space in the field. For expert witness firms and solo practitioners, the options are even fewer.

Big data analytics plays a valuable role in marketing, and it can help with optimizing marketing spend and predicting outcomes, but it relies on correct data to operate effectively. In one recent case my firm worked on, we were looking at predicted incremental revenue from two different promotional offers targeted to two different demographics on two different sales channels.

While the tools we were using were effective, we found after examining the data that the inquiries data wed been given had bundled both sales inquiries with non-sales inquiries, which made effective promo targeting much more difficult.

Put differently, its impossible to effectively determine ROI on marketing spend for, say, Google AdWords versus specialized website banners without knowing whether the leads being generated are sales leads or non-sales leads. A lack of lead validation ends with overstated results on marketing ROI, as well as inability to do effective revenue optimization in marketing.

What does all of this mean for attorneys and others in the field?

First, know what your practice management tools are and are not doing for you. When you are calculating ROI and looking at the sales funnel, is that sales funnel truly comparing apples to apples when looking at alternative investments?

Second, legal professionals should look at using the power of data, but that data needs to be cleaned and structured. Forecasting leads generated by a promotional offer or a new ad campaign is only effective if we understand the characteristics of the leads that come in, and the probability that they actually result in new business.

Third and most importantly, dont just leave the marketing efforts to Google. A simple set it and forget it approach to internet marketing is likely to leave significant opportunities on the table, and result in marketing spend that ends up being partially wasted on unqualified customer leads and on non-sales leads.

In summary, as with so many other facets of the legal industry, there are no perfect solutions, but it pays to do a little homework when making a marketing investment, and know what the results you are truly getting are.

Michael McDonald is an assistant professor of finance at Fairfield University in Connecticut. He holds a PhD in finance. Michael consults extensively throughMorning Investments Consulting and writes for Litigation Finance Journal. Michael has served as an expert witness in legal disputes, and is an arbitrator with the Financial Industry National Regulatory Authority (FINRA). Michael can be reached atM.McDonald@MorningInvestmentsCT.com.

Read more from the original source:
Lead Validation Is Key For Legal Professionals - Above the Law

Forbes

Content Marketing: Five Steps For Creating Insatiable Posts That Rank Forbes Marketing Content In The Digital Age. While the days of traditional advertising are slowly coming to an end, the iconic growth of the internet is in full swing. And although content is no longer marketed as often through old media channels such as ...

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Content Marketing: Five Steps For Creating Insatiable Posts That Rank - Forbes

The process of effective advertising in today's society is becoming more and more difficult, requiring more out-of-the-box thinking. The days of planning your traditional advertisement or marketing strategies against competing businesses alone are over. With the presence and dominance of social media and the web, you now have to compete against a number of distractions, while developing an internet marketing strategy that captivates your target market.

However, that does not mean you have to come up with expensive marketing strategies in order to grab your target's attention. Freelance internet marketing experts can help you develop a marketing strategy that both suits your business, and your budget. Its time to jump on the bandwagon! There are several popular and creative methods that are being used to advertise a business or brand on the internet. An internet marketing expert can help you:

Get published and guest post on niche blogs.

While it might be very difficult and expensive to be featured in a major magazine, it is much easier and just as effective to get featured on a popular blog in your niche. All you have to do is look out for some blogs targeting your market, contact the owners, and offer ideas of how you can benefit their readers in exchange for advertisements. Here are some strategies in this context you can implement:

Post actively and utilize YouTube.

YouTube is one of the largest and most powerful platforms for internet marketing. With over 800 million different visitors a month, YouTube can play a great part in elevating your business or brand online. To implement the YouTube internet marketing strategy effectively, you'll need to post quality and interesting videos regularly. This videos might be promoting your products or simply expressing your perceptions.

Most people usually see creating a video as an expensive and tedious process; the truth is it's relatively easy. Simply utilizing the camera on your smartphone, you can film your online video. Editing the video is also just as easy as creating it. Mac Book users can easily use the iMovie application to edit their videos perfectly. In the event that you do not use a Mac book, you can always get professional video editors on freelancer.com to help with the project.

Set-up a LinkedIn group.

Creating a LinkedIn group is not only free, but it also gives you the opportunity to provide your professional network with a useful and vibrant information resource. In addition to that, a LinkedIn group can also help in generating traffic to your site and increasing sales.

Establishing an active LinkedIn group might be a tough task and will require time. Nevertheless, you should always aim to provide resources or information that'll help your community. Also, your groups should help in connecting your members with other professionals on the internet. Follow these outlines when creating your group and you will be on your way to managing a large scale community.

Executing some of the strategies mentioned above might be difficult and time-consuming, however, that is no limitation to effective marketing, all you need to do is hire professional freelancers. Freelancer.com provides access to thousands of professional freelancers with different skills willing to work at an affordable price. Freelancer.com also provides a platform that ensures you're getting the best out of your money and time with its review system, freelancer test certifications, and other features. In the event that the idea of hiring people to work for you is looking expensive, Freelancer.com gives you the opportunity to state your project and hire based on that budget. Find your perfect internet marketing expert, and take your business to the next level today!

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Hire Internet Marketing Specialists For June 2017 - Freelancer