What is Online Marketing?.

By Gallianno Cosme

For the sake of not being ambiguous and for the purposes of this article, online marketing used to refer to a plain, text-based website that offered product information. The term then got nabbed by SEO companies wanting to take advantage of ill-informed business owners and SEO alone got dubbed the preferred online marketing channel. Today, more and more legitimate Internet marketing experts and agencies are reflecting on what the term actually refers to, namely the practise of using the Internet and other digital media to market products, solutions, and services to a targeted group using many online technologies and platforms, instead of using conventional media such as television or magazines. Yes, it is quite a mouthful, and rightfully so.

Today, companies have many options available to them for communicating with their targeted audiences. The Internet however has become a preferred medium for reaching potential clients across the world as a very cost-effective, highly measurable manner.

To give you an example of some of the mechanics online marketers use, the following can be regarded as some online marketing methods: pay per click (PPC) advertising, interactive advertising, banner advertising, email marketing, affiliate marketing, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, desktop applications, blog marketing, article marketing, online press syndication, podcast advertising or sponsoring, viral advertising, social media marketing…the list goes on.

Naturally, online marketing is done for many reasons. I have identified the following:

• Customer acquisition and lead generation
• Brand identity and visibility
• Customer support, service and effective online client communications
• Public relations

As with most things, the process of marketing a product or service on the Net must start with a solid platform, in this case a website. However, putting up a website is one thing, but getting visitors to visit your site is quite another. Enter online marketing.

Internet marketing strategies are used not only to generate website traffic, but to ultimately form a starting relationship with the visitor. Take for example “response-driven content”, which is the art of writing website copy in such a manner that it encourages the user to take action (submit an enquiry/subscribe to a newsletter), is an important on-site online marketing method that is often overlooked by website owners. Combining this with something like SEO and email marketing, and soon three online marketing strategies starting working together, each complimenting the other to generate that business relationship.

The key to your business’ Internet success is how easily your business’ product, service or solution can be found by prospective customers, how quickly same prospective customers can be converted into a lead, and how that customer can be retained. As such, the principles to online marketing are pretty much the same as with traditional marketing and must be applied according to predefined objectives, target audiences and, of course, budget.

Bottom line is that online marketing is vitally important for any organisation that has invested in designing a site on the Internet.

Have a look at Gino’s other eMarketing articles.