Peeled Complete How Internet Marketing and How it Works Online Marketing
On the other end of the spectrum, there are many companies that tell you that you can make a lot of money all night on the Internet and who try to sell some form of "Internet Marketing Program".
Today, Internet marketing, or online marketing, evolves into a wider mix of components that companies can use as a tool to increase sales - even if your business is online, partly online, or completely offline.
The decision to use Internet marketing as part of the overall marketing strategy of the company really suits the company of course.
But in general, Internet marketing is becoming an increasingly important part of almost any marketing mix. For some online businesses, this is the only form of marketing that is practised.
Internet Marketing Objectives
Essentially, Internet marketing is using the Internet to do one or more of the following:
- Communicate a company's message about itself, its products, or its services online.
- Conduct research as to nature (demographics, preferences, and needs) of existing and potential customers.
- Sell goods, services, or advertising space over the Internet.
Components of Internet marketing (Or Online Marketing) may include:
Setting up a website, made up of text, images and audio and video elements that can be used to deliver corporate messages online, to inform potential and potential customers and potentials about the features and benefits of the company's products and/or services.
The website may or may not include the ability to capture potential customers or directly sell products or services online.
The website could be the equivalent of an offline brochure or an order catalogue over the Internet and this is a great way to build your business identity.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM), which markets websites online through search engines, either by improving the site's natural (organic) ranking through search engine optimization (SEO), purchasing pay-per-click (PPC) ads or paying for PFI purchases) in directories website, which is similar to the offline yellow pages list.
Email marketing, which is a method to distribute information about a product or service or to request customer feedback about a product or service via Email.
Email addresses of customers and potential customers can be collected or purchased. Various methods are used, such as bulletin distribution or bulk offerings related to a company's product or service. Email marketing is basically online direct mail marketing online.
Banner ads, that is the placement of ads on the website for a certain fee. The offline equation of this form of online marketing is traditional advertising in newspapers or magazines.
Online press releases, which involve placing a story worth mentioning about the company, its website, its people, and/or its products/services with online wire services.
Blog marketing, which is to give comments, express opinions or make announcements in discussion forums and can be done either by hosting your own blog or by posting comments and/or URLs on other blogs related to your product or service online.
Which involves writing articles related to your business and publishing them online on syndicated article sites.
This article then has a tendency to spread throughout the Internet because article services allow republishing as long as all links in the article are maintained.
Article marketing can generate a boost of traffic for your website, and distribution of syndication articles can promote your brand to a wide audience.
Which can involve social networks like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and social bookmarking sites like Digg?
Internet Marketing and Home Business
Of all the components of internet marketing, potential customers and clients expect the business to have a website. Actually, no one can raise a red flag to the prospect.
Online usage has become so widespread today, many prospects can easily choose to do business with the company so they can get up to date information 24 hours per day, 7 days a week.
Even businesses that only have local customers, such as one restaurant location or a shoe store can benefit from having a website and engaging in online marketing.
And, businesses whose customers are not limited to geographic areas may find it difficult to find alternative methods to attract customers that offer affordable cost and worldwide Web presence coverage.
Because the "Virtual" nature of most home-based businesses, websites, if not absolute necessities, can certainly benefit home-based business operators.
Since most home businesses have no physical location, a website provides a cheap way for prospects to know what you are doing or what you are selling and can even be a "Showcase" to sell goods and services directly.
The internet has greatly enabled home-grown businesses to thrive because of the low enough cost to start and maintain a web presence. Therefore, Internet marketing should be part of your business plan and marketing strategy.
Finding the Right Internet Marketing Mix
How much of your marketing strategy should be dealt with online, the elements of Internet marketing you use, and the importance of giving you to your website depends on the nature of the business, budget, and, to some extent.
Your personal nature? All of these considerations are part of a strategic Internet marketing decision that helps develop Internet marketing strategies for businesses.
Using Offline Elements with Internet Marketing Strategies
Unless you are transacting a business only online, for example, if you are an eBay retailer, you may want to include some traditional offline marketing elements in your overall marketing strategy in addition to the elements in your Internet strategy in your marketing mix.
Even those who do business online can only consider placing traditional ads in newspapers or magazines to bring prospects to their websites to transact an online business.
Perfect examples including offline elements as part of Internet marketing strategy are Expedia, Travelocity, and Monster.com. Although they are an online business, they invest heavily in traditional advertising, including radio and TV ads, to attract traffic to their site where the business is actually doing.
Develop your preferred Internet Marketing Strategy
If you have a personal desire for "Spam", which is mostly done, you may not want to incorporate email marketing into your strategic Internet marketing plan.
However, email marketing does not necessarily mean simply sending unsolicited messages to every email address you can collect. If you enter a visitor registration form on your website, for example, or if you exhibit at a trade show, you have the vehicle needed to collect email addresses from interested prospects.
You might consider creating a newsletter and sending it to this prospect on a regular basis as part of your strategic Internet marketing plan.
Or, you might just create a schedule where you periodically send emails to your interested prospects to see how they are doing, if you can help them, or if their needs have changed since you last spoke.
So even if you do not include email marketing into your Internet marketing strategy, per se, you still use email as a tool to promote your business.
Your Budget and Internet Marketing Strategy
Of course, your budget will also determine which components you use in your Internet marketing strategy that you may develop.
A website will ask you to choose a domain name and register it and to purchase web hosting services from your site.
Both items are highly ignored, in fact, recently I saw bidding for domain name registration only $ 1.99 per year - provided you also purchased other services, such as hosting, which are now also available for less than $ 10 per month.
Once done, you need the design and content for your website, which you need to provide or pay for the professional web content and/or web designer to handle for you.
Once your content and design is available, you definitely want your site found, so you want to learn about search engine optimization (SEO), which is an important part of strategic Internet marketing, do you do it on your own? pay someone else to do it for you
Ideally, if you are paying to have web content written for you, the content should be optimized for search engines when written. Likewise, you or your web designer should know something about SEO because how your site is designed can increase or limit your site traffic.
And in most of the cases, SEO should be an important part of your Internet marketing strategy. In either case, you may pay a little more, but you will save time in the long run.
Once your website is up and running, you'll need to defend it yourself or switch the assignment to an independent Webmaster to do it for you.
Pay-per-click advertising (PPC), like Google AdWords, can easily be done within your budget because you can determine how much you're willing to pay when someone clicks on your ad and the amount you're willing to pay per day.
You can also specify whether you want to include your ads only on search pages or on other sites related to your keywords. You can set geographic time limits and the time when and where your ads run.
Plus, PPC ads are pretty easy to activate and delay whenever you need to do it, they're easy to update and they provide real-time tracking benefits that you will not get with most of the other elements in your Internet marketing strategy.
You can also use images and/or videos with PPC ads, which may be more cost-effective than installing banner ads on other websites.
On the other side of the currency, you can use pay-per-click advertising to make money with your website, through programs like Google AdSense, Yahoo Publisher or Microsoft AdCenter.
Tracking the Results of Internet Marketing Strategies
Let's face it: average home business operators are not payable in cash. If you are going to spend money on strategic Internet marketing initiatives, you must track how effective they are.
When you do, you will find Internet marketing strategies that work for your business and which are not. And, you can learn from the mistakes you make in Internet advertising campaigns to improve your skills and increase your success.
Know what money is worth spending and what is not very helpful in developing Internet marketing strategies as your business grows.
Strategic Internet Marketing Needs to be Flexible
Keep in mind, in many cases, patience is a true virtue when it comes to tracking the success of a strategic Internet marketing campaign.
Search engines are unlikely to find you overnight and your strategy may not generate income immediately.
Since you really have millions of competitors who are also involved in strategic Internet marketing, this will keep you on the watch and be prepared to make the necessary adjustments in your Internet marketing strategy when appropriate.
However, some knowledge, some powerful help, and a well-managed strategic Internet marketing plan can increase your chances of success.
