Online Marketing

Online marketing

Online marketing craze is at an all-time high among businesses. These days, the internet is considered a tool that can replace traditional marketing methods.

Online or internet marketing is a set of different tools that marketers use in order to promote their products, service, or simply their website to a specific audience. It is the effort of spreading the word about your company or even about your own self using the internet to reach your target market.

What makes marketers and individuals so drawn about internet marketing is the fact that it is both cost efficient, and can be done anywhere. It is used both by large and small companies. Internet marketing methods, over the years, has grown to different channels including social media, email marketing, and copywriting to name a few.

A different brand of advertising?

What makes online marketing different from traditional advertising? Traditional advertising is blunt and direct when it comes to its messages. In fact, it tells you directly its message, whether it is planning to sell you a product or looking to get you to sign-up. On the other hand, internet marketing is a bit more subtle when it comes to its message. Over the years, internet marketing has expanded. And today, it is known for its different channels. Here are some of them. .

Web design

Internet marketing is about first impressions. One of the things that can leave either a good or a bad first impression is your website. It is important that you hold a visitor’s attention for the first ten seconds in order to convince them to even find interest to what you are offering. Though written content can help explain what you are offering, a website’s overall look can elicit an emotion and even potentially convert a visitor into a customer.

If you’ll look at the websites ten years ago and compare them to what it is today, you will notice a huge difference. What are the dominant web design trends today?

Let’s head down to the basics of aesthetics first. Today, flat colors have become popular among websites. It appears to continue its popularity even on some of the most popular mobile apps. Next, you also have the importance of both photos and videos. Thanks to HTML5, it is now possible to make use of photos and videos without making the run slow.

It is important that your website is going to match the overall branding that you want to have on your company.

Apart from aesthetics, navigation is important. It is imperative that the site is easy to use for the users. Usability is one of the features that you should always have to check when it comes to designing a website. In relation to functionality, these days, websites need to accommodate the fact that a lot of people are using their mobile phones rather than their laptops or desktops.

80% of internet users now have smartphones, while half of all smartphone users grab their device right after waking up. Mobile friendly device is an important factor in online marketing given the fact that it can affect both your conversion rate and ranking.

As rule of thumb when it comes to having a website, always have a site restore option. This gives you the ability to restore data in case something happens to your website.

SEO

Search engine optimization is becoming a big deal today. It is one of the leading internet marketing methods used by companies on a daily basis in order to improve their traffic, and basically improve the visibility of their company on their relevant audience.

SEO has changed over the years, mainly due to the number of search engine algorithm updates made mainly by Google. Google is the largest search engine to date. It holds around 75% of the searches made worldwide. In addition to this, it processes around 40,000 search queries every second which is equivalent to 3.5 billion daily searches. That only shows how people relied on Google over the years.

These days, the most relevant information can be found most likely on the top of the search result page. With Google’s current algorithm, it is more likely enough to just check the first few sites that appear first to find the answer users are looking for.

This tends to affect businesses in more ways than one. A lot of users no longer see it necessary to look at the other websites found in succeeding search result pages. For those websites that don’t rank well, they are losing traffic, and are already losing the battle against competitors.

In fact, a majority of search engine users today just focus on the first five websites that appear on the search result.

The reality is that there is no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to SEO. However, as a general rule of thumb, it is crucial to provide a good user experience to your audience. This means providing highly informative content. In addition to this, it is also important to adopt a mobile-first website that fits on smaller screens and accommodate mobile searches.

Social Media

Social media is, by far, one of the most popular internet marketing strategies today. And it is the most popular option for a good reason. There are billions of social media accounts today. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are some of the most popular platforms today.

Social media is a goldmine for a lot of businesses, especially those that run on limited funds. Social media platforms have been able to categorize its users based on demographic and interests. This data is crucial especially in targeting your potential market. That being said, your social media content can be used to be seen by your potential target market using sponsored post options by platforms like Facebook and Instagram.

If you plan on using organic means of spreading the word about your company, then social media is a good tool to use. It can be used to make a post go viral. But before you can even do this, it is important that you have a good number of followers.

You can build followers by becoming consistent with your branding and have a voice that matches what you want your audience to perceive of your company.

Social media is a powerful tool in order to tell a story and make the company relatable to your audience. You can upload high-quality videos and stunning photos that can catch people’s attention. It can even help improve your company’s reputation among the niche.

If you are doing everything correctly, it is possible that you are building the right kind of relationship with your audience. And what makes it even better is that it can be done without putting a dent in your bank account.

Email marketing

Another important internet marketing strategy is email marketing. Despite the many changes that have happened in the World Wide Web, email marketing still remained relevant through the years. Why should you still keep using email marketing? The reason is that people are still using emails. People spend a part of their day checking emails both from their desktop and even on their mobile device.

In a study, 91% of Americans love receiving promotional emails from companies that they love. If you are so engrossed on Facebook and Twitter, email marketing in 2014 was viewed 40 times more effective than these social media platforms.

But of course, you just can’t build a solid email marketing campaign overnight. You will need to work hard to get people sign up on your email list. You may have to improve your company’s reputation, and in some occasions incentivize your audience why they should start signing up on your email list.

It also takes minimal effort in order to implement email marketing. Today, there are tools that you can use to automate sending of emails to your potential market.

Content marketing

You hear it often that content is king. Just how true is this statement? Content marketing, according to experts has a number of purposes to your internet marketing campaign.

One, the goal of an effective content marketing strategy is to be shared. This can help maximize the overall exposure of your brand to a relevant audience. Aside from shares, it is important to be discussed. This strategy can also lead to more shares, but discussions can even be better since you have more people engaged to what you just wrote.

And of course, content marketing can also help generate leads. And when it comes to leads, every company always wishes to convert these leads either into sales or as part of their email list.

Blogging is a popular platform used for content marketing. It allows websites to publish their own unique content. Blogging can incorporate not only texts but also photos and videos that can further improve readers’ experience.

Video Marketing

YouTube is the second largest search engine. From 2016 to 2020, mobile video is expected to rise by as much as 11 times. These days, a video is a form of content online. And for this reason, it is important to take video marketing seriously.

If it is your goal to increase sales, you have all the reason to utilize video marketing. After watching a video, 64% of users are more likely to buy a product online based on studies. Videos can also increase engagement of a particular page ad by 22%.

And of course, it is also good for SEO. Having a video on your website has 53 times more likelihood that you are getting on the first page of Google.

What makes an effective video? It depends on your purpose. There are videos that explain and educate, while there are those videos meant to stir strong emotions and affect your buying decisions. The good news is that you don’t only have YouTube as your platform for video marketing. Vimeo and Instagram are also becoming popular.

Location based marketing

If you have a local business, then you’ll find location-based marketing a great leap in technology especially in internet marketing. Location-based marketing was popularized mainly due to the increasing number of people using their mobile phones.

If you’ll look at Instagram, you’ll see posts that include locations where the photo was taken. For a restaurant, for example, these types of businesses can boost their presence by allowing their location to be part of user content.

With the help of GPS-enabled content, it publishes the location of your store/restaurant and let existing customers make the necessary content for you.

Location-based technology can also help in providing both reviews and rating which can even further build an audience for your business. One way to maximize this kind of internet marketing is by providing free Wi-Fi in your local business. This encourages people to check-in and create posts for you.

Affiliate marketing

If sales are your goal, why not have other people work for you and just incentivize them for their effort? That’s the concept of affiliate marketing. You give a percentage to an affiliate marketer who promotes the product or services that you offer.

Affiliate marketers are usually bloggers who established a good reputation in their niche, therefore has a higher chance of influencing the niche.

Why engage in internet marketing?

There are a lot of reasons why you should be engaging in internet marketing today. One, it is not as expensive as other traditional options. In fact, even paid options are cheaper. You can just pay for the actual performance of your ad via Pay-Per-Click strategy.

Next, the results can be measured, and strategies changed. You can always look at the metrics if your online strategy is actually working. You can measure the engagement and see if you are really targeting the right people that you want to target.

Lastly, since internet marketing costs so much less than your usual traditional advertising, it can allow the small players have the advantage of competing against much bigger and more financed firms in their niche. It is common now, thanks to the internet, to see startups being able to rise to the success only possible if you had a lot of money.