What is all this buzz around Online Marketing?
What really is online marketing all about?
Online marketing refers to the practice of usage of channels that are based on the internet for the purposes of spreading a message with respect to an organization’s products, brand and services to the potential consumers.
The techniques and methods that are used during the course of online marketing involve social media, emails, SEO, display advertising and other such methods. The whole objective of the marketing efforts is to reach out to the potential consumers via the channels where the target audience spends the most time searching, reading, shopping and socializing online through various platforms.
The wide adoption of the world wide web, for personal and business use has created a lot of new channels that can be used for the purposes of advertising and marketing coming together, including the methods that are mentioned above.
This also comes with a lot of challenges as well as benefits which are inherent to online marketing, that uses the primary mediums of digital nature to engage, attract and convert these virtual visitors into real consumers.
Online marketing is all together a different animal when compared to the forms of traditional marketing, which used to historically include channels like billboard, print, radio and television ads.
Prior to the emergence of online channels for marketing, the cost of marketing products and services often used to be outrageously expensive, and historically very difficult when it comes to measuring the results.
Just think about the ad campaigns that are run on the national television, that get measured via focus groups consisting of consumers in order to determine the level of awareness about the brand. Such methods are not at all well suited for controlled experiments.
As of today, just about anyone who has a business online (this also applied to most of the offline businesses nowadays) can take active part in online marketing just by building a website and starting to build acquisition campaigns targeted at potential consumers at very little or just for free.
Such kinds of marketing services and products also come with the ability to allow experimentation with optimization in order to fine tune the efficiency and the ROI of the campaign.
What are the advantages of marketing online?
One of the key benefits of adopting online channels in order to market a product or a business is the inherent ability of being able to measure the impacts of any particular channel, along with the information regarding how the visitors that are acquired via various channels end up interacting with a site or a landing page exposure. Out of all the visitors who get converted to paying customers, some further analysis is possible in order to determine what channels are the most effective in acquiring the valuable consumers.
Doing an analysis of the mobile app and web experiences has the potential of determining the following:
• Which of the channels of online marketing proves to be the most efficient in acquiring consumers, based on the rate of conversion of visitors into consumers, and cost of acquiring these visitors.
• Which of the channels is more effective in acquiring as well as driving high lifetime value for the consumers – such as in the case of email marketing, which helps in driving repeating purchases from previous consumers.
• Which groups of consumers show a strong, engaging behavior and a high potential with regards to upsells – such as selling software or apps for mobile phones, where the ultimate expectation is selling more products to the customers who have a high level of engagement.
A few tools for online marketing
There are a lot of tools which can be put to use in building and maintaining a strong online program for marketing:
• Marketing on social media
• Email marketing
• Display advertising
• SEO
• Events and Webinars
• SEM
• Content Marketing
• Website optimization and A/B testing
• Video marketing
• Content marketing
• Marketing Automation
• Marketing Analytics
• CRM
A few examples of online marketing
A few examples of campaigns for online marketing include:
• Canon typically advertises for keywords in search that have a relationship with ‘”photography” on Bing, Yahoo and Google search engines in order to market the camera that they make to the targeted audience.
• Whole Foods gets in the process of collecting email addresses via their website in order to market new products, events and sales at their stores.
• Dove gets into the act of creating video ads and shares those ads with their targeted audience on Twitter, Facebook and the other social networks in order to promote a favorable conversation regarding their products and brand.
Although marketing on online channels creates a lot of opportunities for the businesses in growing their presence with the help of the internet and create their audience, there also are some inherent challenges that are typical to these methodologies of marketing.
To begin with, the whole act of marketing can turn into an impersonal experience, because of the virtuality of the message and methods adopted to deliver the content to the desired people. Marketers must form their strategies with respect to online marketing by a very strong perspective of their consumer’s preferences and needs. Techniques such as user surveys, user testing, and personal talks can be very helpful for these purposes.
Online marketing also can be very competitive and crowded. Although the advantages of providing services and goods are far reaching and local markets can be very empowering, the contention can also be hugely significant.
The organizations that get invested into online marketing sometimes find that it is difficult to capture the attention of their visitors because of the large number of businesses who are also marketing their services and products online. These marketers need to get into the act of developing a balance in building a very unique value proposition and a brand voice while they go around testing and building campaigns for marketing on different channels.