Why Online Marketing

What is online marketing?

Also known as internet marketing, web marketing or search engine marketing (SEM).
It is a marketing strategy of promoting or advertising organizations, products or services using online media with the goal of increasing sales and profits.

Why online marketing?

1. It has proven to be cost-effective in distributing information to global market resulting in a growth for your business.
2. The number of internet users increases everyday, thus, more time and money are spent online by consumers.
3. People especially shoppers uses search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN and others) and directories to look and buy for products or services. The need of visibility and exposure of a site is important.
4. Customers trust in the safety of online shopping due to secure systems that fight against fraud.

Different methods, strategies and services are available for effective online marketing and some of which are as follows:


Web Design and Development

It is important how you appear online. Your website should speak who and what you are, what your products and services are and who your target markets are. It should starts with the right web design and implementation to attract customers, make them stay and revisit your site.

Search Engine Marketing

Internet users uses search engines (both broad-based and vertical search engines) to search, inquire, shop and buy online. Having a website is not enough. You need to visibly expose to let them know you exist.

SEM is broken down into:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Pay per click (PPC)
Press Release
Submissions to Directories and Social Bookmarking sites
Media Optimization:

• Blog marketing
• Multivariate testing or optimization
• Viral marketing (i.e. video clips, interactive Flash games, ebooks)
• Forums

Email Marketing

As the name implies, it is sending mails via emails to customers or potential customers. Sending letters to thousands of emails is cheaper than sending to thousands of postal addresses. Despite abusive spammers, still it is one of the powerful marketing tools. There are different kinds of email marketing online.

Direct Email
It is sending a promotional message in the form of an email like announcing a special offer or service. It encourages recipients to take a look on something that may be of their interest. In sending mails, it should be industry specific. You won’t mail out to list who least need or doesn’t need your service or product at all.

Newsletters
Unlike promotional messages, it carries promotional advertisements in the form of newsletters. More than just mail messages, it should be of value to readers – inform, entertain and benefit them to develop a long term impact to the readers.

Advertisements from newsletters
This is buying an ad space from newsletters and other promotional emails to advertise your product to their subscribers.