Internet marketing (also known as online marketing) is a common term that all marketers and business owner will use to get more sales and promote their brand at the same time.
In simplified terms, internet marketing refers to a process that use internet or search engines to increase your brand awareness and bring more sales conversion from the potential customers to purchase your products or services.
You may ask why I differentiate between internet and search engine in the paragraph above.
The answer is simple as internet marketing methods such using social media marketing, email marketing, content marketing and video marketing does not related directly to search engines as compared to content marketing, SEO (search engine optimization), and PPC (pay-per-click).
There are many channels and methods of internet marketing which will not depend on what you sell and also the nature of your industry and market niche.
But since it’s a quick guide to let you folks understands the meaning and usage of internet marketing, I will do an introduction on the various types of internet marketing that is popular today.
SEO also known as search engine optimization has becoming a necessary means of online marketing tools that most of the business around the world depends heavily to grow their business.
You can refer to my article “Understanding SEO” or “The Fundamental Basics of SEO” for more in-depth information.
PPC (pay-per-click) is a method which you need to pay a fee each time the visitor click on your online advertisements in the search engine which is normally in the first page. A good example will be the Google Adwords which is very popular in the online market now.
I will advise you to learn the basic of PPC from the Google Adwords if you are keen to promote your products or services but bear in mind that you will need to set aside a monthly budget to maintain your online advertisements in the search engine.
Email marketing is one of the online marketing method which you can promote your products or services by email to all the prospective customers using an email software within a timeframe.
Email marketing is relatively easy to learn and more cost saving than other online marketing methods and all you need to do is to buy the software, configure the email template for the email campaign and you can do the mass email.
The only disadvantage is the conversion rate will be much lower as compare to PPC or SEO.
Content marketing is to promote your articles via the search engine to increase the page ranking of your website.
The purpose is to create interest for the visitor to understand and indirectly increased the percentage of converting them to potential customers.
Most online articles will use social media (Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and Linkedin) to share the content and also use the related keywords from the content to build links which will increase website page ranking if you do it correctly.
To know more on content marketing, you are welcome to refer to my other articles
“What is SEO writing”, “SEO Writing Strategies 2018” and “The Principles of SEO Writing” for your better understanding.
Nowadays, social media marketing is the ongoing trend which is using different online platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google Plus and Reddit to do various promotions and even advertisement.
One strong advantage of social media marketing is that it involves a lot of people from various professionals and it’s considered one of the fastest way to spread your message or information that is related to your company.
But you will need to be really cautious on how you use social media to promote your brand as it’s a two way communication between the writer and the reader.
Which means that if you get too many negative review or comments on your product or services, it will affect your brand’s image badly.
Last but not least is the video marketing, it is relatively new in the online market and use the influence of short video to advertise your products, services or even articles that you have written online.
While it’s easy to engage the viewers by promoting in the website or uploading the video in youtube.
You will need to spend time and effort to create the video that can capture the audience’s attention within a short time span of 5 seconds or less.
While internet marketing is important for your business, it will be good if you have a Digital marketing expert in your office or hiring a company that is specialised in Digital Marketing.
