Online Marketing - Introduction
Internet marketing is like digging a gold mine. 97% people focus on 99% dirt and keep complaining. 3% people focus on 1% gold and keep it collecting.Marketing is carried out with the intent of reaching out to a maximum number of people in exchange of minimum cost. When Internet was still in its formative years, marketing people used to depend on traditional media such as television, radio, handbills, billboards, newspapers, and magazines.
− Sanja Budin, Owner, smartbizprofits.com
Today, the Internet is premium source for promoting your business. There has been a rapid rise in the number of internet users since last few years. Thus Internet is the lucrative place to promote the business.
What is Marketing?
As defined by the American Marketing Association, “marketing is the activity, set of institutions and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offers that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large”.Marketing changes the perspective of a person. There are two approaches of marketing −
- Traditional marketing
- Online marketing
What is Online Marketing?
Online marketing is advertising and marketing the products or services of a business over Internet.Online marketing relies upon websites or emails to reach to the users and it is combined with e-commerce to facilitate the business transactions. In online marketing, you can promote the products and services via websites, blogs, email, social media, forums, and mobile Apps.
Online marketing is also termed as Internet marketing, Web marketing, or simply, OLM.
Difference between Traditional and Online Marketing
The goal of traditional marketing and online marketing are same − To attract and drive visitors of advertise to buy the product thereby increasing the business profit. Let us see the difference between two approaches now −| Traditional Marketing | Online Marketing |
|---|---|
| It is difficult to measure. You cannot know how many people read your advertise and how many took favorable action upon viewing it. | It is measurable. You can know the number of people who viewed the online advertise, and the number of ones who purchased the product. |
| It is not cost-effective. | It is more cost-effective. |
| It is not so good for brand building. | It is fast and efficient for brand building. |
| In some way, it interrupts regular activities of users such as television advertises interrupt the program you are watching, billboards divert focus of the driver, etc. | It is not interrupting. The user can attend online advertises as per his/her convenience and preferences. |
| It may leave users’ queries unanswered as printing or narrating complete information about the product or service may not be always feasible. | It can provide maximum information about the product or service, offers, and transactions. |
Components of Online Marketing
Online marketing has various components as shown in the illustration below −
Here in this tutorial, we will provide an insight into each of these components one by one in detail.Market Research
Business organizations need to set clear objectives and strong market understanding. To research the market, you can −- Review your website traffic.
- Review the Ad conversion rates.
- Review the queries asked by your existing customers.
- Identify the customers’ pain points that they post on various platforms such as yahoo answers, blogs, social media, and other sites.
- Anticipate and compile a list of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) with their clear answers and align them to customers’ pain points.
- Include the fact sheet about product if required.
Keyword Research
Choosing a correct and relevant set of keywords can help design a crisp and persuasive advertise for online marketing. Before accessing any keyword research tool, ask yourself −- What is the purpose of this web page?
- How clearly can I state the conversion event?
- Have I clearly answered all the pain points that users might look for on this page?
- Which phrases the users might enter while looking for a solution?
- Are my keywords relevant to the users’ intent?
SEO Friendly Website
Mapping the right keywords around the users’ pain points in a hierarchical manner makes an effective website. You need to categorize the keywords in a thematic order and then link the respective articles to the keywords. This makes the website easy maintain.Web Analytics
The ultimate goal of analytics is to identify actionable insights on monthly basis which can help to make favorable changes to the website gradually. This in turn ultimately leads to strong profits in long term.Online Advertising
It is placing crisp, simple, and tempting Ads on the websites to attract the viewers’ attention and developing viewers’ interest in the product or service.Mobile Advertising
It is creating awareness about the business and promoting it on smart phones that people carry with them inseparably.Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
It is the activity of optimizing web pages or complete website in order to make them search engine friendly, thus getting higher position in the search results. It contributes to overall rankings of the keywords through influencing factors such as appropriate titles, meta descriptions, website speed, links, etc.Social Media Marketing
It includes creating profiles of your brand on social media platforms such as Google Plus, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook, etc. It assures that you remain connected to the existing or potential customers, build awareness about the products and services, create interest in and desire to buy your product, and interact with the customers on their own terms and convenience.Email Marketing
You can interact with the customers to answer their queries using automatic responders and enhance the customer experience with your website.You can offer the options such as signing-in to subscribe to your newsletter. You can make the emails catchy and crisp, so that they don’t make recipients annoyed. Also, you can use selected best words in the subject line to boost the open rate.
Content Marketing
It includes creation and sharing of media and publishing the content in order to acquire and retain customers.Blogs
Blogs are web pages created by an individual or a group of individuals. They are updated on a regular basis. You can write blogs for business promotion.Banners
Banners are long strips of cloth with a slogan or design. They are carried for demonstration, procession, or hung in a public place. There are internet banners in parallel to tangible banners for advertising.Internet Forums
They are nothing but message boards of online discussion websites, where people posts messages and engage into conversation.Online Marketing - Terminology
Here is a list of the standard terms used in the domain of online marketing −Advertiser
It is a person or an organization that places advertisements to drive sale or lead through it.Banner
It is an online advertisement in the form of a graphic image that appears on a web page.Bid
It is the maximum amount an advertiser is ready to pay for a click.Black Hat and White Hat Tactics
They both are the tactics of online marketing. There is no color significance about being good or bad.- Black Hat Tactics are less pure and farther from search engine’s terms of service.
- White Hat Tactics of online marketing are closely bound to a search engine’s terms of service.
Breadcrumbs Navigation
It is a navigation scheme that reveals user’s location on the website or application. It offers a way to trace the path back to the user’s original landing point.Campaign
It is a series of operations performed to achieve a desired goal in a particular area.Click Through Rate (CTR)
Click Through Rate = Clicks / Impressions %Conversion
A visitor when completes a target action.Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)
It is the cost the advertiser pays only when a desired action is achieved.Cost Per Click (CPC)
It refers to the amount the advertiser pays when his Ad is clicked on, giving him a visitor to his website − typically from a search engine in PPC marketing.Cost per Mille (CPM)
It is the amount paid for every 1000 impressions of an advertisement.Customer Pain Points
They are annoying, frustrating, and difficult to solve things or situations for the customer, which the customers may not have anticipated or cannot verbalize. They need urgent addressing.If This Then That (IFTTT)
It is a web-based service with which the users can create chain of primitive conditional statements, called recipes. The recipes are triggered based on changes to other web services such as Gmail, Facebook, Instagram, etc.Inbound Link
It is a hyperlink on a third-party web page that points to a web page on your website.Key Performance Indicator (KPI)
It is a metric that shows whether an objective of the business is achieved.Market Reach
It is the total number of people or households exposed at least once to a medium of Advertising in given span of time.Paid Search Advertising
It refers to paid advertising on search engines, sometimes called PPC advertising. The advertiser pays only for each click on the Ad.Publisher
It provides the advertisers a required amount of space on its website to publish the advertisement.Quality Score
It is a variable that influences ranking of a website.Search Engine Optimization
It is process of elevating website ranking in the unpaid results of search engine.Tracking
It is measuring the effectiveness of an online advertise by collecting and evaluating statistics.Web Indexing
It is the method of indexing the contents of the website or the internet as a whole.Online Marketing - SEO Friendly Website
“Good SEO work only gets better over time. It is only search engine tricks that need to keep changing when the ranking algorithms change.”In today’s age of information and marketing, the website of the business is the key to the entire business. It is crucial for a business to make its website listed at higher position. A high-position website increases the visibility of the website to as many people as possible.
- Jill Whalen, SEO Practitioner for last 20 years.
Why do I Need an SEO Friendly Website?
You can make your business website catchy and engaging, by maintaining a simple and aesthetically pleasant design. You can add relevant texts and images at appropriate places, use pleasant color schemes, etc. But while competing with the other parallel online businesses, making a pleasant and well-organized website is not sufficient to acquire higher rank. You need to make it search-engine friendly too.Wendy Piersall, the Blogger and Speaker, says, Google only loves you when everyone else loves you first. A search engine should notice your website and enlist it at high rank.
To make it effective in terms of Search Engine Optimization, you need
to add description about the content used on the web pages and use
appropriate keywords.Crawlers
The search engine such as Google sends crawlers (also called spiders or bots) to harvest the content on your website. Crawlers are nothing but programs which systematically browse the Internet for the purpose of web indexing. They cannot comprehend images or animations but can read their tags.The crawler adds your web pages into the search engine’s database. You need people to find your website for the content they search for. To materialize this, you need to serve the content to the crawler in such format that it can interpret, analyze, and identify its relevance with users’ search query.
The crawler compares the information on the web page with the information it finds by itself. It executes various algorithms to check if the page is indeed relevant and ensure that you are not trying to fool the system using Black Hat SEO tactics to make your page rank higher.
Developing an SEO Friendly Website
In order to acquire high rank and make your website search-engine-friendly, you need to follow the given guidelines −- Build a website that search engine can read and understand. Use the technology such as CSS.
- Create a sitemap to make search engine help discover every page of the website.
- Get links from trusted sources.
- Use Accurate keywords to get your page captured.
- Add Meta tags and text to your images.
- Make sure that your HTML code is error-free.
- Check and act upon for broken links. For example, 404 errors.
- Remove any hidden text.
- Do not plagiarize content from other websites. Keep original content.
- Keep the content up-to-date.
Basic Preparations
- Discuss website specifications with the web design and development team. Get a clear idea on content, organization of information, etc.
- Group and organize the content by relevance. Use menu items to help users find the information easily.
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