Internet marketing is widely accepted as the most cost-effective way to reach your target market, regardless of your business’s size.
How exactly does it relate to today’s context?
Also called online marketing, web marketing, or digital marketing, internet marketing is the process of promoting products or services over the internet, utilising tools to drive traffic, leads, and sales.
Web marketing is a pretty broad term that encompasses a variety of marketing methods – e-mail, search, social, influencer, paid media, and more.
Today, web marketing is often referred to interchangeably with Content Marketing. Why is this so?
Content marketing will remain relevant today and for the foreseeable future. It involves, among other things, a focused approach to developing and dispersing important, appropriate, and consistent material to attract and maintain a well-defined audience. All of these ultimately contribute to achieving profitable results in any interaction with customers.
Think of it this way, content marketing works inversely with conventional advertising (outbound marketing), and in combination with strategies that befit today’s digital marketing landscape.
Why Selling no longer works (Conventional Advertising)
In traditional advertising, ads are displayed to the masses in the hope that you can at least get some of them to buy. However, the process is interruptive, obstructive, and invasive. You probably know what traditional advertisements look like because you’re bombarded with them every day: TV commercials, signboards, magazine ads, and radio ads.
Conventional advertising strategies, like those mentioned above, have been around for a long time. Ads still have their place, but it does not change the fact that users can click out of advertisements online if they do not want to see them.
According to a PageFair report, 615 million people around the world use ad blockers. Use of the latter has increased 30% in 2016 alone, and it is easy to understand why. Ads are annoying and hardly the way people want to hear about products or services. Instead of shoving ads in front of people, today’s businesses will need a more subtle and genuine approach. This is where internet marketing comes in.
Successful businesses online release content that teaches, inspires, guides, or solves a problem for their target market. With proven techniques, the targets can discover that content on the web without having to force the matter on consumers.
Customers can interact with the brand organically and share their content on social media, which leads to the following:
- Fostering of trust
- Establishment of authority
- Creating connections with customers
- Connections with customers
All of the above happen when businesses succeed in offering something of worth to customers. In return, enterprises are rewarded, and that is what internet marketing/content marketing is all about at its core.
What does it take to succeed in online marketing?
So, you’re entirely on board for this web marketing thing? Perhaps you like the idea of getting imaginative, sharing value with your prospects/audience, and structuring brand name loyalty and customer relationships naturally.
Hold that, though; online marketing is not something businesses should delve into blindly. A great deal of thought and planning must be allocated to the following:
What is your Online marketing strategy?
Internet marketing without a specific strategy in mind is bound to fail. You must have a destination and methods to determine your progress if you expect to get anywhere. If you need help with the matter, businesses can turn to an internet marketing services provider to help them with the following:
Your Brand Name Persona and Target Market
When you ultimately begin developing content, you need to understand who you’re talking to and customise your brand voice to appeal to them distinctively.
If you aren’t targeting the ideal audience (those people who will lean in to hear what you’re stating), you will not find success. Moreover, if you can’t find a way to stand apart, you’ll mix into the hordes of other brand names vying for attention in your market.
Keywords Research
As soon as you have determined who precisely you are marketing to, the next step is to figure out ways on how to best reach your target audience. How do you want them to find out about your business? What problems do they need to fix?
Uncover keywords relevant to your business that can put your organisation on the map via search engine results, and look for topics that have an intrinsic value for your audience before you develop any material.
The Focus of Your Content
What types of material will you develop? How frequently will you post? Where will you publish? It would help if you nailed down these foundations so you can create the content with consistency and quality.
Content Development
As soon as you have subjects, keywords, a unique voice, and a target market, you can create content. Nevertheless, if your content isn’t insightful and of value, then you are just wasting your time.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
No content marketing strategy is complete without SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). These two things go together to expand business reach and visibility online.
SEO experts can advise you on a wealth of techniques that assist in getting you into prime spots on search engine results pages (SERPs). This suggests individuals can discover your website simply by searching for a topic they’re interested in or need help with on the search engine.
The overarching objective of great SEO is to get your site pages ranked on the first page of Google. (After all, most people seldom, if ever, click to Page 2 on their quest for details.)
Here are some fundamental SEO methods that will assist your material get indexed and ranked in the search results page:
- Strategically-placed keywords. You need to place your target keyword in the headline, subheaders, content, and meta description to help Google instantly determine what it’s about.
- A properly designed, efficient website. Google looks at certain qualities of your site, such as functionality, navigation, and relevance.
- Proper webpage URLs — The URL structure for your pages shouldn’t be a mess (i.e., http://yourdomain.com/blog/content123xyz-asdfkla). They need to be simple and make sense (i.e., http://yourdomain.com/blog/how-to-do-seo).
Persistence and Perseverance
Online marketing also needs elements that are far less concrete than SEO but just as essential. It takes some time to start seeing returns from your investment. The post you publish today will generate traffic straight away. It could take a few weeks or even a few months.
Hence, businesses need the perseverance and fortitude to wait months, perhaps even a year or longer, to start seeing returns, as online marketing builds momentum gradually.
In conclusion, everything mentioned in this article about online marketing is just the tip of the iceberg. Books have been written around the subject matter and cannot possibly be covered in a single piece. However, that is not necessarily a bad thing; businesses all have the opportunity to get their share of the pie in the ever-changing world of internet marketing.
