Some 30 years ago, online marketing in the corporate world was almost insignificant. However, today it is without a doubt the number one marketing tool available for an organization to market their brand and their products. The internet has touched everyone. Let’s find out what types of online marketing are at your disposal. Then you can choose what is best for your organization, and identify and start reaching your target audience.
Social Media and Networking
Social Media is hands down the strongest online marketing channel that is at your disposal in today’s market. Large organizations spend millions of their budget on social media marketing campaigns. Why? Simply because it is not just a one-way communication method like TV or other broadcasting methods.
Social media can help companies create excitement, target customers, and gain customer feedback. You get real-time interaction with your target market. You can find out what they like and dislike in a matter of seconds, measuring their response and even reacting in real time. Plus, you can launch a perfectly targeted marketing campaign that will only be visible to who you want. For example, if you are selling Lip Gloss, you can specifically target your ad to be only shown to females within a specified age limit. Efficient and effective, meaning you get better reach for every dollar spent.
Further, you can use social media sites to gain website traffic by creating content that attracts readers and encourages them to share the content through their own social media accounts, breeding company loyalty and making your followers your a highly targeted and effective referral network reaching their own circles.
Web Advertising
Companies purchase advertising space or sponsorship space on a website, much like they would in a magazine or newspaper to raise brand awareness or drive click-through visits to their own websites. This is an easy decision to make if there is a web property popular among your target audience, like a car enthusiast site or community if you’re in the automotive business, or a fashion page if you’re in clothing.
Email Marketing
Companies use this form of trackable, direct marketing to send their message to a select group of people in order to build relationships, encouraged loyalty, drive repeat business, and acquire new customers. However, with the introduction of services such as Box be and features such as Google Gmail’s Promotion filter and constantly evolving spam detection technology, this strategy is not as effective as it once was. These tools have evolved because email marketing has been widely misused, with a lot of email traffic on the internet being labelled as “spam” or unwanted, unwanted email (though the label applies to many categories other than promotional emails too).
Search Engine Optimizations (SEO) and Marketing
Nowadays almost no one scrolls to the bottom of a search results page to find a result. So, you might want to promote your website to the top of the results page to generate more traffic. This is why companies influence the visibility of their website in a search engine through paid advertising, called search engine marketing, or by making adjustments to their sites to enhance the search engine ranking, a sometimes-sneaky process known as search engine optimization.
Affiliate Marketing and Influencers
Companies reward their affiliated properties for each site visit or sale gained by affiliate marketing. Here, an affiliate may use other methods of advertising to bring people to your site or initiate a sale. This is different from referral marketing, which is relationship/trust driven, as affiliate marketing is solely financially driven, often using revenue sharing, pay-per-sale, or cost-per-action as the compensation method. Plus, now there is a trend in investing in influencers. “Influencers” with a large follower base on Instagram, YouTube and other platforms attract huge traffic to their content, and if you feel like the community of these influencers overlaps with the community who would patronize your offering, then you might want to try out sponsoring one or two of their videos, or working with the influencer to give your an on-air endorsement.
For More Resources:
- 3 ways to optimize your social media strategy
- 5 tips to improve your search engine ranking
- Finding the correct Marketing Mix