What is Internet Marketing?
In the traditional form of marketing, mediums like TV, newspaper ads, banners, and prints dominated the physical world. But now, over 4.8 billion people have their hands on the internet today.
That means that a significant part of marketing functions is taking place with the help of the internet. It covers all activities starting from lead generation to lead nurturing via online mediums.
So when we use these combinations of strategies to market the product and services, it is termed internet marketing. The brands and companies get an opportunity to use a variety of methods and platforms for communicating with customers, such as email, social media websites, or ads.
But internet marketing is not just about reaching out to prospects. It includes a lot of aspects such that your marketing can reach your target audience at the right place at the right time.
In this article, we will discuss in-depth internet marketing covering the following:
• What is Internet Marketing?
• Why is Internet Marketing important?
• Types of Internet Marketing
• Strategies to conduct Internet Marketing effectively
• Internet Marketing Examples
Understanding Internet Marketing
Internet marketing refers to promoting a company or a brand about its products and services through online tools and digital means.
Internet marketing is an umbrella term that covers a wide range of marketing strategies and avenues that can generate leads, drive traffic and boost sales.
Internet marketing can also be called online marketing because it relies on digital mediums and platforms to promote the brand by targeting its audience. With the help of internet marketing, the brands can build better relationships with the audience and provide helpful information that resonates with the brand.
In this way, the customer also knows what they expect from the brand and what today's customer wants. Internet marketing can be carried via various digital platforms, tools, and content delivery systems like:
- Website content
- Social media
- Blogging
- Videos
- Podcasting
- Online advertisements
- Email marketing
- Sponsorships
- Paid promotions
- Digital interactive flip books
Overall, internet marketing aims to create awareness about the brand, sell the products and services, convert prospects and build longtime relations with the customers.
Why is Internet Marketing important?
Internet marketing uses the customers' online activity and then connects them with the business by reaching out in various places over the internet. Internet marketing not only delivers meaningful information to solve the customer's problems and needs but is also accessible on-demand.
Let's take a look at the five crucial factors reflecting the importance of internet marketing:
- Accurate Results
- Access to global market reach
- Enhanced Customer experience
- Cost-effective and budget-friendly
- Automation of marketing functions
1. Accurate Results
With the help of internet marketing, the brands can set a target audience and get to know about the specifications based on users, gender habits, behavior, or age. As a result, it becomes easy to put your products in front of the audience at the right place when they are most likely to purchase or take action. This makes internet marketing a potent tool to use for the benefit of the brand.
2. Access to global market reach
Internet marketing helps you reach a wider audience and global market reach by finding your audience in specific locations and then regulating the ads outreach as per your objectives.
With the help of ads, you can locate down to specific countries, cities, districts and then run through that aligns with your goals.
3. Enhanced Customer experience
Internet marketing helps to connect with the customers and provide them with a highly personalized shopping experience. For example, welcoming them via emails and offering them based on their taste and preferences can enhance the overall customer experience.
Here, the customer will also feel special, which will ultimately drive engagement for your brand. The business also gets the opportunity to manage their ads based on the users' groups and pages that they can operate accordingly.
4. Cost-effective and budget-friendly
Internet marketing is regarded as one of the most cost-effective and budget-friendly strategies as compared to traditional marketing.
You do not need to maintain the physical resources or display products for the audience. Internet marketing will help you get accurate results and drive interested people to your website. The cost of running ads is budget-friendly and allows running multiple ads based on the product.
5. Automation of marketing functions
Functions like lead generation, customer retention, and lead nurturing require a lot of time and effort. With the help of internet marketing, you can automate these functions that can help you to reduce the stress and time required to manage the overall operations.
Aside from that, the automation process helps to assist people at different stages of the journey by having a chatbot system, answering FAQs, and so on.
Hence, internet marketing aligns with the way your customers prefer to discover and purchase your products or services. Further, it can give you the flexibility to adjust as per your industry or size and guarantees you results in no time.
Types of Internet Marketing
There are several types and techniques to drive online traffic, leads, and sales under internet marketing. All of these types are meant to promote your brand and grow your audience step-by-step by sharing valuable and high-quality content.
Following are the types of internet marketing that are considered adequate and speed up the growth of the brand:
- Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
- Content Marketing
- Social-media Marketing
- Email marketing
- Pay-Per-Click advertising
- Influencer Marketing
1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search Engine Optimization, commonly known as SEO, is optimizing the website or blog to rank higher in the search results. The purpose of SEO is to drive traffic over your website and increase your rank in search engines.
This is the reason why SEO marks as the most crucial part of internet marketing.
In order to achieve the goal, the following are some of the best practices that are used for SEO:
- Generating high-quality content for the target audience
- Improving the user experience by improving the web design
- Using a combination of primary and secondary keywords
- Making your website load faster and enhancing the responsive rate
- Adding videos, illustrations, and images for presentation
- Linking backlinks from authoritative sources in the industry
2. Content Marketing
Content marketing focuses on sharing valuable, industry, and niche-related information with the audience. As a brand, content marketing is considered a crucial part of internet marketing because the content is the first thing a visitor gets attracted to.
Moreover, content marketing is backed by an effective content marketing strategy with a motive to create content consistently and post online on different mediums to reach the audience wide.
Under content marketing, the content can come in numerous forms that include:
- Blog posts
- Infographics
- Ebooks
- Videos and more
To make your content stand out from the competitors, the brand should focus on producing high-quality, easy-to-read, well-researched, unique, and interesting content for the readers.
3. Social-media Marketing
Social media marketing is regarded as the most cost-effective internet marketing strategy to start and generate an online presence.
There is a wide range of social media platforms that a brand can choose to reach their targeted audience and pull off a wide variety of engaging content.
The type of platforms that a brand looks out for includes the following:
- YouTube
- Clubhouse
- Medium
With the combination of paid and organic marketing, social media provides an excellent opportunity to market online and reach wider networks to share information.
It not only helps increase brand awareness but also has to interact with the audience and build your overall brand voice.
Social media marketing is considered an essential part of internet marketing.
4. Email marketing
Email marketing refers to sending direct emails via electronic medium to connect with your prospects and customers. It enables you to communicate with the leads interested in your products and services related to purchase or website sign-ups.
Just like social media marketing, email marketing is also considered a crucial type under internet marketing. Here, the brand gets the opportunity to create and promote different kinds of emails that include:
- Newsletters
- Follow-Ups
- Recommendations
- Promotions
- Rewards
- Campaign offers
The brand can take advantage of advanced targeting and personalization options with the email strategies and hit the users with reminders and deals that lead to an increase in conversion rate.
Personalizing email by writing their names and recognizing special events like birthdays or anniversaries is a cherry on top.
5. Pay-Per-Click advertising
Pay-per-click advertising comes under the paid type of internet marketing strategy. Under online paid advertising, the brand pays for search advertisements and display ads when clicked by the user.
Pay-per-click advertising helps drive traffic to your website at a very low cost and builds you higher search results. s
6. Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing has taken a significant turn, and brands utilize this type of internet marketing to the fullest. Under influencer marketing, the people who have an excellent social media presence promote the brand's product and services through their content.
For example, Lay's signed up many top influencers on Tik Tok and Instagram for the launch of their new flavors. Influencer marketing is known to draw the audience's attention quickly and grow the demand for that particular product.
These were the six major internet marketing types that a brand can choose to engage with the customers, build brand voice and identity, and provide the best customer service at the end.
Strategies to conduct Internet Marketing effectively
While conducting internet marketing, there are many strategies and actions that a brand undergoes to achieve the desired results through internet marketing.
Following is the checklist of five of the most actionable strategies to use and conduct internet marketing effectively:
- Create an SEO and user-friendly website
- Commence with one channel at the initial level
- Gradually implement on more channels
- Create a consistent customer journey
- Automate the process wherever necessary
1. Create an SEO and user-friendly website
A website is the first impression of your brand. In other words, the website is the face of the brand, and hence, the website should showcase good graphics, have a color combination, pose a faster loading rate, and be easy to navigate.
The website should be optimized for quality content that can rank in the search engine pages, including SEO and related keywords. A user-friendly website will help attract the visitor and showcase a particular product or service the brand offers.
2. Commence with one channel at the initial level
One of the most effective internet marketing strategies is to start with one and then move to many. The brand should analyze its audience and find the relevant channel or medium that can align with its goals.
For example, if the brand wants to nurture the leads, emails are a great way to educate and promote the particular product or service. Similarly, if the brand wants to generate a higher traffic rate at minimum cost, they can go forward with Pay per click advertising.
Moreover, the brand should have complete knowledge of the medium that they will use for marketing. After getting hands-on experience on platforms, they can move to others.
3. Gradually implement on more channels
This internet marketing strategy is highly recommended for brands and businesses. As soon as your business and audience start growing, you get a chance to take action on more channels and create more touchpoints.
Start with experimenting with new methods and using multiple channels for marketing purposes.
Gradually you will get an idea about the styles and communication required for different channels, and you can go forward accordingly.
4. Create a consistent customer journey
Your customer journey starts right when the customer interacts with your brand for the first time. Here, you need to step into the shoes of the customer and feel the emotions that they might have during the interaction,
What kind of questions they are having or,
What are you sharing to dispel their doubts?
Understanding the customer journey is regarded as the best internet marketing practice.
5. Automate the process wherever necessary
There are lots of processes and functions under internet marketing that are time-consuming and complex at the same time. With the help of automation, the brands can save a lot of resources because of the pre-equipped chatbots and email workflows to perform the work. For example, you can have a 24/7 WhatsApp chat system to stay in touch with the customers automatically.
By implementing the process, the brands can concentrate on significant functions and procedures that require due attention.
The strategies mentioned above help to effectively run the internet marketing for your brand and fulfill and improve the overall structure of marketing.
Internet Marketing Examples
Many brands and companies are making the best use of internet marketing and setting a benchmark for their competitors. In a real sense, using marketing tools and turning the theory into actions have amazed the audience to the fullest.
Let's take a look at the two best Internet marketing examples to get inspired from their approaches:
- Sephora and Social Media
- American Express and Content Marketing
1. Sephora and Social Media
Sephora as a brand has emerged as one of the most prominent players in the internet marketing industry, having a very substantial online presence. They extensively used social media as a more significant role in the sale of the products and gave it a visual appeal by organizing many contests and campaigns. Moreover, they shared tutorials for applying their product in the form of videos and valuable information through advertising.
As a result, the customers experienced a shoppable experience through the medium, and the brand witnessed increase in sales from Instagram itself.
This is a perfect example of knowing your buyer's persona, being available for them, solving their queries, engaging with the existing and potential customers, and ultimately creating customer loyalty.
2. American Express and Content Marketing
American Express has the best strategy for building authority as a brand by aiming to set a specific target and share reliable and trustworthy information.
The brand uses content marketing campaigns to provide relevant information and help the public with matters related to corporate solutions, trends, tips for marketing, cash flow, and productivity.
As a result, the campaign was successful. Because of the consistency in the flow of articles and posts, the website became a reference for the entrepreneurs to start their business and grow bigger by referring to their blogs and overall content.
This is how American Express has built the authority and created an essential relationship with the users and influencers.
Hence, these internet marketing examples give you an idea of how internet marketing strategies help develop the base and build insights for the brand. It will not only help to activate clients into royalty but also capture the entire market through trust.
The bottom line is that with the help of the internet, you can embrace more fantastic ideas and great content to help you invisibility in multiple ways.
Internet marketing as a medium is enough to attract, build a brand image, and turn prospects into promoters. Adding to it, the internet marketing strategies will work best only if you implement the correct methodology and provide valuable content to the customer.
The way you interact and the type of relationships you hold with the online community is crucial to attracting quality leads and ultimately converting them for the future.
How Deskera Can Assist You?
Whether you are a sales manager or running your own business, there are tons of duties and responsibilities that you have to fulfill. Using the Deskera CRM system, you can manage your contacts, leads and sales deals. You can use the CRM system to manage all customer data and manage your leads, sales negotiations and deals.
Doing so will help you to save the time taken in transferring customer data between the different systems. Having a good CRM system will help you manage your financial and sales reports and be prepared to kick-off your meetings.
Deskera can also assist you with real-time updates about your business like cash flow status, customer satisfaction, inventory management, sales, purchases, purchase orders, customer tickets, customer satisfaction, managing leads, revenues, profit, and loss statements, and balance sheets.
Moreover, it would also help in integrating sales methodology across different platforms onto one system so that you have a consolidated list for email campaigns, leads management, and sales pipeline to mention a few.
It will also help you to sync between your orders, payments, taxes, refunds, product variants, sending out invoices and reminders, facilitating invoice management, and even undertaking follow-ups and advertisement campaigns.
Such a consolidated platform will help you to improve your sales through building effective sales compensation plans and also facilitate faster and well-informed decision-making. It will help you in strengthening your opportunities and being braced for the threats.
Deskera books and Deskera CRM will also be able to ensure the highest customer satisfaction and thereby an increase in net revenues and net profits.
Key Takeaways
In this article, we went through the details of internet marketing and witnessed its importance to building the brand image in the audience's eyes.
With so many detailed insights and referring to case studies, Internet marketing delivers value to people worldwide. Depending upon the size and nature of the business, the entrepreneurs can utilize numerous channels to share valuable content and tap the resources to their best advantage.
Let's take a look at the key takeaways of the article:
- Internet marketing refers to the promotion of a company or a brand about its products and services through online tools and digital means.
- The other name for internet marketing is online marketing because it relies on digital mediums to promote the brand by targeting the audience.
- Internet marketing covers platforms like social media, videos, podcasting, sponsorships, paid promotions, and blogging.
- Internet marketing uses the customers' online activity and then connects with the business by reaching out to them.
- Five crucial factors reflect the importance of internet marketing in today's world.
- The factors include accuracy of results, access to the global market, enhanced customer experience, cost-effective approach, and automation of marketing functions.
- There are several types of internet marketing techniques to drive online traffic, leads, and sales.
- There are six major internet marketing types: SEO, content marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, pay-per-click advertising, and influencer marketing.
- There are lots of strategies and actions that a brand can undergo to achieve the desired results through marketing.
- The strategies include:
- Create an SEO and user-friendly website
- Commence with one channel at the initial level
- Gradually implement on more channels
- Create a consistent customer journey
- Automate the process wherever necessary
- Many brands and companies are making the best use of internet marketing and setting a benchmark for competitors.
- Brands like Sephora and American Express give you ideas on how internet marketing strategies help develop the brand's base and insights.
- The right strategy and action plan are essential to make your internet marketing efforts stand out and result in the success of your business