What is Internet Marketing?
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What is Internet Marketing?
Internet marketing is an umbrella term that is used to refer to wide range of strategies and techniques that are aimed at improving the online visibility of a brand, product or service. The ultimate aim of internet marketing is to enhance the overall visibility of the brand under question and thereby help the brand achieve its business objectives, which could be increasing sales, increasing membership, etc. Every single website that we see online is subjected to a very high level of competition and if a website has to outsmart the stifling competition, it is important that the brand be backed by carefully planned internet marketing strategy.
Different Ways To Market Your Website Or Business Online Through Internet Marketing
Internet marketing encompasses multiple strategies and it forms the entire corpus of both paid traffic generation strategies as well as organic traffic generation strategies. It is important that we take a holistic approach to ranking websites. It has been proven that a well-balanced internet marketing plan is more effective than compartmentalized, isolated or random efforts. We can list various ways through which we can market our website, business or brand online.
1] PPC Campaign or Pay Per Click Campaign
This is a paid advertising strategy, which gives your website instant online visibility. PPC campaigns are very helpful especially in the beginning stages of your website’s history when your organic traffic generation efforts such as SEO are still underway. Moreover, PPC campaigns are also used as a supportive traffic generation strategy even if you have full-fledged organic traffic generation plan. Many people think that setting up and running a PPC campaign is very simple and easy. We are often made to believe that we just need to set it up once and forget about it totally. No! that is not the way that it works. If you want to get the best results, you will need to put in consistent efforts during the setting up phase as well as during the management phase. If you are using Google as your PPC service provider you will need to have a Google certified professional to manage your campaigns or else, you could easily be draining all your marketing budget in PPC campaigns without really obtaining any noticeable positive results. The disadvantage here is that you need to be continually increasing your marketing budget to cope up with the increasing competition. Once you stop the funds to PPC, your traffic also stops instantly. Despite these challenges, this strategy could be used to supplement your other ranking efforts.
2] Email Marketing
Even today, email marketing is one of the most influential strategies. In fact, with the proliferation of internet enabled handled devices and smartphones, email marketing is becoming an increasingly effective strategy with better click through and conversion rates. People are able to access their mails on the go and this takes your brand very close to your target audience. Your brand related information gains immediate visibility among the right audience. You will however need to build your opt-in list if you want to engage in email marketing. You cannot send your marketing mails to random users. Moreover, it is important that you pay attention to the spam guidelines or restrictions pertaining to the geographic region that you are targeting.
3] Banner Advertising
This used to be one of the oldest advertising strategies. By displaying your logos, offers and other brand related marketing information in other websites you will be able to drive good traffic to your website provided you display your banners in the right networks.
4] SEO
This is one of the most important and the most extensively used internet marketing approaches. SEO stands for search engine optimization. Search engine optimization aims at improving the visibility of a website by making the website search engine friendly. It has been noted that search engine friendly websites stand a better chance when it comes to good search engine ranking. Search engine optimization tries to make a website relevant for a specific keyword search that is made by the internet users and thereby get listed in top positions in the search results page. SEO has two major areas namely on-page optimization and off-page optimization. You will be able to enjoy success with your SEO efforts only when both on-page and off-page efforts are well balanced. Today both are equally important to boost the visibility of a brand online. SEO takes time to yield results but the results obtained are more sustainable here unlike PPC or other paid traffic generation strategies. Moreover, SEO is a highly cost effective approach to ranking websites.
5] Content Marketing
Good quality content has always paid a very important role in Google ranking efforts. Google is primarily a content based search engine. Most of its ranking algorithm relies on the web content at various levels. By making extensive use of content marketing strategy, you will be able to easily further your brand’s interests. One should not mistake content marketing strategy to be limited just to article marketing. Content marketing covers much larger area than just article submissions. It includes blogging, social media engagement, building positive content around the brand through reputation management efforts and so on. It is therefore prudent to approach a reliable content marketing company to support your efforts here.
6] Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing has now become a mainstream strategy. If you want to improve your online visibility, you must have very good social media presence. You will need to build your social media presence in top social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and Pinterest. Social media marketing is a highly powerful internet marketing strategy, you will be able to reach thousands of people instantly through social media channels.
We have identified different ways of marketing your business online. What needs to be remembered here is that you should not limit your efforts to just one strategy or approach. You will need to take a highly integrated approach to internet marketing, only then you will be able to outdo the competition and take your brand to the next level.
