Internet Marketing

What is Internet Marketing?

Internet marketing, also known as Digital marketing is involved with the promotion of products and services online through web-based digital devices such as mobile phones and computers. Internet marketing makes use of advanced strategies like affiliate marketing, display marketing, social media marketing, or influencer marketing which has overpowered the traditional system of visiting physical stores. In today’s era, the internet is prevalent in every nook and corner of the world. The intensity of usage and reliance on the internet has now taken on a new form that facilitates marketers to disseminate their products and services online.

Geeky Takeaways:

• Internet marketing provides a global reach, allowing businesses to connect with a vast audience regardless of geographical boundaries.
• Internet marketing often offers cost-effective alternatives to traditional advertising.
• Internet marketing allows for real-time tracking and analysis of campaign performance.

How to Create an Internet Marketing Strategy?

1. Setting Up Objectives: The first step in creating an internet marketing strategy is setting up your objectives based on what results you want to achieve from internet marketing. It may depend on whether the requirements are focusing on increasing sales, targeting a large consumer market, or promoting the brand.

2. Identifying the Audience: The second step is to analyse the target audience and cater to their needs and wants. This will help the organisation in attracting large consumers in the market.

3. Recognition of Competitors: The next step is to identify the rival businesses, analyse SWOT, and make their own products and services better than that of competitors.

4. Selecting the Appropriate Channels: After setting up the objectives, one must decide which channel is appropriate as per their goals. These channels may include affiliate marketing, display marketing, Email marketing, search engine marketing, social networking services, or many others.

5. Content Strategy: Setting up content in the form of videos, blogs and posts in such a manner that it provides clarity and interest to the consumers.

6. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO): Developing search engine enough user user-friendly so that visibility and traffic can be raised.

7. Social Media Marketing: Social Media profiles can be created on various platforms to engage with potential customers.

8. Email Marketing: Along with social media interaction, one must have to develop a list comprises of respective audiences to connect with them consistently.

9. Paid Advertisement: Another way to have a large global audience and target consumers is by releasing ads through Google and other social networking sites.

10. Analysis and Tracking: The next step is to use certain tools and strategies to analyse the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. One can always study and strengthen implemented strategies from time to time.

11. Budget Allocation: Investing money carefully by making proper plans on which marketing channel will provide the maximum returns.

12. Testing and Optimisation: One must make sure to test and evaluate strategies catering to market conditions.

Types of Online Marketing Channels

1. Social Media Marketing: Social media is one of the most powerful platforms in today’s world. Almost every person is engaged with one or the other social media sites such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, Twitter or YouTube. Therefore, marketers must necessarily promote their products through such platforms since today’s audiences make their purchase decisions based on likes, comments and reviews. These platforms also make it easier for marketers to initiate two-way communication with their consumers and reply to their queries.

2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Improving search engines leads to higher user engagement and improves traffic. Using certain keywords and links enables the websites to stand at a higher rank in the unpaid organic search engines such as Google and Bing. For example, if a person searches for “Best Value Stocks”, there is a higher probability that he/she will click on the top results available on Google.

3. Pay-Per-Click (PPC): Pay-Per-Click can convert passive buyers into potential customers who may be ready to pay for the products. Pay-per-click is initiated when a person clicks on a certain ad and that leads to another portal providing them with detailed information about the product or an option to buy the one. If the consumer seeks interest in the information provided, he/she automatically makes a buying decision.

4. Email Marketing: Email marketing helps marketers to connect with the audiences by sending them exclusive discounts, offers and customized content. Email marketing helps in winning the loyalty of their customers as well as increasing sales. The discounts and offers provided motivate a lot of subscribers to keep up with the updates.

5. Video Advertisements: Video advertisements are those ads which are released before or during the streaming of a video. The consumers get a chance to buy the product or attain additional information about it at the end of the advertisement.

6. Network Marketing: Network marketing is engaged with person-to-person sales. It is that type of marketing channel where the marketers influence their consumers to promote their products among their networks or friends with a basic idea of a reward mechanism. The people associated with sales are known as independent distributors, participants or contractors. Such people earn commissions or rewards based on their product sales, or through sales done by recruiting new agents into the business. This process of targeting consumers attracts early users and trendsetters.

7. Contextual Marketing: Contextual marketing helps in both promoting the product as well as improving brand image. In this strategy, the marketers search and buy platforms which have a larger user engagement and stand as a higher rank search portal. These platforms help the marketers to advertise their products online.

8. Affiliate Marketing: Companies use affiliate marketing, a performance-based approach, to work with affiliates who market their products and services using digital channels such as websites, blogs, social media and Email marketing. Advertisers offer affiliates certain tracking codes or links and whenever a customer clicks on the links or buys the product, the affiliate gets paid a commission or a percentage of sales.

9. Influencer Marketing: In this form of marketing, the marketers tie up with the influencers (people who have a substantial amount of followers on social media and prominently get higher views on the content posted by them). These influencers promote the products on behalf of the marketers.

10. Audio Marketing: Audio marketing makes use of podcasts such as Spotify as well as smart home assistance such as Amazon Alexa. The biggest advantage of audio marketing is people get to hear the advertisements in the form of audio recordings while they can easily carry on with their other work.

Role of Internet Marketing

1. Full-Time Availability: The results of marketing strategies are always transparent and available to the potential consumers 24×7.

2. Increases Brand Awareness: Marketers may come across a significant potential global audience by breaking geographical and cultural barriers.

3. Ensures Global Engagement with Audiences: Internet banking ensures large user engagement by expanding its reach through social media and other networking sites.

4. Helps in Recognising Target Audiences: Internet marketing helps in studying the market thoroughly and provides marketers with an idea of which segment they can target to buy their products by personalising their products and services.

5. Improves Brand Loyalty: When the audience gets an opportunity to study the products and services through reviews on the website, they get clarity which may positively build their loyalty towards the brand.

6. Analysis of Effectiveness of Online Campaigns: Internet marketing makes use of certain tools and strategies which helps them analyse if their campaigns are effective, whether or not the audiences are getting attracted to the content shown, and whether it is giving a positive vibe in the minds of the buyers.

7. Helps in Identifying Competitors: Internet marketing helps the markets to identify businesses selling similar products and services and analyse whether their products are unique and outstanding as well as stand as per the requirements of the audiences.

How to do Internet Marketing?

Online marketing does not need a lot of investment, rather it needs experience and effort. To have successful online marketing, marketers must know how to attract consumers and create brand awareness. Marketers can thus, do online marketing by:

1. Sharing Content Through Various Channels: Marketers should review their content and try to present it in a new way from time to time such that it attracts potential consumers. For instance, they can turn their blogs into an exciting online marketing campaign with the use of YouTube promotional videos.

2. Adopting a Long-Term Social Media Content Strategy: Marketers, need to keep their business’s social media handle active the society along with continuous posting of content. Focusing on permanent social media content will not only help in targeting new consumers but will also help in strengthening relationship with existing customers.

3. Optimising Search Engines: Since we already know that SEO enables larger user engagement since consumers are more likely to follow portals/links that are displayed at higher ranks in search engines, it is essential for marketers to use appropriate keywords and links.

4. Building a Mobile-Friendly Website: Marketers need to design their website in such a manner that it provides simple but complete information on who they are, the history of the company, what they are trying to sell, and what are their aims. This will help the consumers to distinguish their products from the competitors.

5. Ensure Posting Blogs Regularly: People are effectively attracted to blogs. Posting consistent blogs will help the business to establish a good market by retaining clients. Marketers may provide information about their products through such online blogs.

6. Initiating Email Marketing Campaigns: Keeping aside all the social media platforms, Emails particularly play a crucial role in attracting subscribers who are keen on keeping updated about the product/website. Marketers must make a list of their consumers and keep sending updates related to offers and discounts to their mail addresses.

7. Developing Communication Through Social Media Platforms: People are more likely to follow a brand if they care about the concerns of the public. Brands must develop a habit of answering every essential query that is being raised by the general public. These interactions will help in developing brand loyalty and trust among the consumers.

8. Publishing Online Press Release: A news release which is published online helps to reach a wider audience by increasing brand awareness. Online press releases are a better way of significantly spreading the company news among large groups of people.

9. Creating Paid Social Media Campaigns: Paid social media campaigns are sets of advertisements that work together to support a certain cause. Here marketers have the advantage of investing low budget with a guarantee of gaining a huge audience.

10. Introducing Pay-Per-Click: Marketers need to pay to avail of the PPC strategy. As we have already read, PPC facilitates marketers to distinguish and rank their websites at the top of the search engines.

11. Posting Regular Video Content on Social Media Platforms: Videos are a better way of representing visual information as compared to written blogs. To get efficient results, marketers must consistently post video content on YouTube and other social media platforms since the eyes of the customers are only attracted when they click their memory.

12. Collaborating with Influencers: People spend most of their time on social media seeing reels, stories, posts and vlogs. Influencers create a feeling of trust among their followers. They tend to believe the reviews and comments passed by the influencers. Therefore, collaborating with influencers sounds like a great idea for a successful online marketing strategy.

Examples of Internet Marketing

1. Red Bull: Red Bull, a leading energy drink brand encourages sports and adventure to advertise its products. The brand slogan used by Red Bull is ‘Red Bull gives you wings’. In 2012, Red Bull launched an interesting digital marketing campaign called “Stratos”, in which Felix Baumgartner was shown in a live-streamed video, breaking the Guinness World Record for freefall skydiving by jumping from space. The video gained 6.8 million views on YouTube. The video cultivated a feeling of risk and excitement in the minds of the viewers (specifically youngsters) though the ad itself had overlooked the product. The main success behind the ad was it displayed events beyond human limits. Live streaming also helped in developing a sense of friendship and immediacy.

2. Slack: Slack is a well-known instant messaging app for corporate users. Slack used the word-of-mouth strategy to grow its business by creating a digital marketing campaign on Twitter with the name “The Wall of Love”. In this particular Twitter account @SlackLoveTweets, Slack re-twitted the positive experiences shared by its users to prioritise user experience and feedback. Such kind of strategy is proof that the brand promises to live up to whatever it shows in its content. Slack experienced an increase of more than 8 million active users after successfully launching the ad.

3. Nike: Nike, a popular sports brand sells a wide range of products such as footwear, apparel, and equipment. It is the World’s most valuable clothing brand for seven times in a row as of 2022. Nike makes use of influencer marketing by promoting its products through athletes such as Michael Jordan and LeBron James showcasing commitment, loyalty, and great skill to its users. In Nike’s “How We Do” campaign, Nella Rose, a popular fashion influencer was seen promoting boxing among the youngsters.