From communicating, entertainment, to learning, and shopping, the internet is used for almost everything. In fact, 4.57 billion people were online, and the number is increasing every moment. This figure presents internet marketing as an unbelievable opportunity for business owners and markets to connect with the right audience in order to promote their brands, products, or services more effectively.
The Internet offers plenty of benefits like a choice to personalize content, the scope of reach, audience targeting, and building stronger relationships with customers are just a few of them.
What Is Internet Marketing?
Internet marketing (online marketing, digital marketing, eMarketing, and digital advertising are other names) is a broad term used to describe marketing tactics conducted through the internet (online). Online marketing incorporates a wide variety of strategies and tactics, like search engine optimization, social media marketing, content marketing, email marketing and pay-per-click (PPC), etc.
While the core purpose of internet marketing is to sell products, goods, or services, a brand or business can also use different digital marketing techniques to increase brand awareness and build credibility.
How Important is Internet Marketing?
Internet marketing is most important these days because almost 59 percent of the global population is online. That’s why it could be an amazing opportunity for you to reach consumers that are looking for products or services you are selling. Billions of people come online daily just waiting to find your brand as the best place to shop what exactly they need.
As the internet is the best place to find information and knowledge of all types, people also spend time online to find relevant information and details about their favorite brands and companies. That is the reason, internet marketing can help your brand reach those qualified leads to convert them into customers.
Digital marketing also enables your business to be open around the clock without worrying about working hours or overtime employee wages, thanks to the mobile responsive websites, AI chatbots, and social media sites. It also helps customers to browse your business online anytime anywhere either to get information or to place orders.
Popular and Useful Types of Internet Marketing
As a beginner, if you want to make your business online even without spending a lot of bucks, possibly social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram could be the best place to get started effectively. hence, if you want to increase the online visibility of your business, there are different types of internet marketing that you can integrate into your marketing campaign to attain the desired outcomes.
1- Search engine optimization (SEO)
Search engine optimization or SEO is a process of optimizing web pages and digital content for search engines to improve SE rankings to boost organic traffic to a website or particular web page. For instance, if you want your internet marketing company to appear at the top search results when someone type ‘digital marketing services agency’, SEO is the only way to make it happen.
Search engines use ‘crawler bots’ to crawl the web and create an index of the content and options available online. And when someone searches a phrase or keyword to find something, the search engine then shows the most relevant and useful results.
There are two main types of search engine optimization, on-page SEO, and off-page SEO.
What Is On-Page SEO?
On-page or on-site SEO is all about optimizing your website and its other content to increase its visibility in search engines for focus keywords.
On-page SEO is a mix of techniques:
- Boosting website loading speed
- Optimizing web design for mobile devices (mobile responsiveness)
- Use of focus keywords in the content
- Title tags and meta description
- Image SEO (optimizing images for search engines using target keywords)
- Internal and external linking
SEO is closely related to content marketing as it is all about optimizing web design and content on your site for search engines with an intention to appear in more search results.
What Is Off-Page SEO?
All the methods and tactics used outside of your website to rank it higher in search engines are known as off-page SEO.
Off-site SEO includes building strong and relevant links for your site, establishing a robust presence on social media and getting more brand mentions, etc. It helps you get a lot of authority links to your website. When there are so many quality websites link to your brand or business, search engines like Google assume you have quality, informative, and useful content. As a result, it ranks your website higher in top SERPs.
2- Content marketing
Content marketing is one of the most effective types of internet marketing. It is the process of creating, publishing, and promoting relevant content across a variety of digital channels with an intention to attract, engage, and convert your audience into valuable customers.
There are so many forms of online content that brands can use to boost their content marketing efforts such as:
- Blog posts
- Long-form articles
- Case studies
- Research papers
- Interesting and informative videos
- Infographics
- Ebooks
- Podcasts
- Emails
Content marketing works very closely with many other internet marketing methods like social media marketing and search engine optimization. For example, creating SEO optimized content is one of the most effective ways to increase the online visibility of your brand in the search engines and make it appear in more search results.
3- Social media marketing
Social media marketing is the art of engaging the target audience and get more sales through social media websites like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, etc. It is one of the best types of internet marketing to reach and connect with the target audience as everyone is using social media apps.
It can be split into two main parts, organic and paid.
Creating social media profiles, adding useful business information, and posting quality content to gain and engage followers is an organic approach to use social media for your business. On another hand, creating and running paid ads to reach your target audience based on their interests, search behaviors, and demographics is considered paid social media marketing. However, you can choose the right option for your brand according to the available marketing budget or resources.
4- Influencer marketing
It is another most effective type of internet marketing. Influencer marketing is all about partnering with influencers to promote your brand, business, product or service to their huge online following.
As influencers are people with a massive online following, they can help you convey your corporate message to a wider audience that might be interested in your products or services.
Before increasing the use of social media and other digital mediums, influencer marketing was affordable to giant fishes only. But now everyone can get an advantage from influencer marketing, thanks to the micro-influencers.
5- Email marketing
Email marketing is a practice of using emails to send direct marketing messages to consumers with an intention to acquire new customers for your business and retaining the existing ones. It is one of the best internet marketing methods to reach your target audience in a more personal way. It has the power to connect you with the consumers already looking for products or services you are offering. Hence, you need to do proper homework and research before sending emails if you really want to achieve the desired outcomes.
You can start it by capturing email addresses by asking your website visitors or blog readers to subscribe to your newsletter. After building an email list, begin to nurture your subscribers with the most relevant and useful content, special offers, discounts, and early access to your brand-new products, and so on.
Customer segmentation is the key if you really want to reap the benefits of email marketing to secure more leads and sales.
6- Paid advertising
A form of marketing where the business owner or marketer pay to show their ads on a variety of digital channels including search engines and social media sites is known as paid advertising. It is the perfect and result-driven digital advertising technique to reach qualified leads if you have a lot of bucks in your marketing budget. Paid advertising is also referred to as pay-per-click marketing as the business or market pays an agreed sum of money each time a user clicks on its advertisement.
Running paid social media ads is a commonly used online marketing tactic to reach the target audience which is truly interested in your brand or products.