Defining Internet Marketing
Also called online marketing, it is the process of promoting a brand, products or services over the Internet. Its broad scope includes email marketing, electronic customer relationship management and any promotional activities that are done via wireless media.
It also combines the technical and creative aspects of the World Wide Web such as advertising, designing, development and sales. Moreover, Internet Marketing also deals with creating and placing ads throughout the various stages of customer engagement cycle.
Online marketing is divided into different types:
Affiliate Marketing:
It is a marketing practice wherein a business pays an online retailer, e-commerce site or blog for each visitor or sales that these websites make for their brand.
Display Advertising:
This refers to advertisement banners that are displayed on other websites or blogs to boost traffic for their own content. This, in turn, can increase product awareness.
Email Marketing:
From the name itself, this is a marketing process that involves reaching out to your customers via email.
Inbound Marketing:
This type of Internet marketing involves sharing of free valuable content to your target market to convince them to become your loyal customer; Setting up a business blog could do this.
Search Engine Marketing:
This is a form of marketing that promotes a business through paid advertisement that appears on search engine result pages. This includes paid placement, contextual advertising, paid inclusion or through search engine optimisation.
Search Engine Optimisation:
Contrary to SEM, SEO uses the unpaid and natural process of promoting content on SERPs. This includes keyword research and placement, link building and social media marketing.
Social Media Marketing:
Based on its name, social media marketing is the process of promoting a website through various social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest and more.
Why Internet Marketing is Important?
The Internet has the power to connect millions of people from around the world. Thus, it also has the capabilities to bring your business to millions of your target market worldwide. What makes this process a best inclusion to your promotional effort is the fact that you don’t need to shell out plenty of money.
In addition, the effectiveness of your campaign can be easily measured using web analytics and cost-volume-profit analysis tools. However, it requires you to learn the many facets of Internet marketing so that you’ll know whether your efforts are giving the return on investment that you want for your business.
