What is Internet Marketing?

Defining Internet Marketing

Also called online marketing, it is the process of promoting a brand, products or services over the Internet. Its broad scope includes email marketing, electronic customer relationship management and any promotional activities that are done via wireless media.

It also combines the technical and creative aspects of the World Wide Web such as advertising, designing, development, and sales. Moreover, Internet Marketing also deals with creating and placing ads throughout the various stages of customer engagement cycle.

Online marketing is divided into different types:

Affiliate Marketing

It is a marketing practice wherein a business pays an online retailer, e-commerce site or blog for each visitor or sales that these websites make for their brand.

Display Advertising

This refers to advertisement banners that are displayed on other websites or blogs to boost traffic for their own content. This, in turn, can increase product awareness.

Email Marketing

From the name itself, this is a marketing process that involves reaching out to your customers via email.

Inbound Marketing

This type of Internet marketing involves sharing of free valuable content to your target market to convince them to become your loyal customer. This could be done by setting up a business blog.

Search Engine Marketing

This is a form of marketing that promotes a business through paid advertisement that appears on search engine result pages. This includes paid placement, contextual advertising, paid inclusion or through search engine optimization.

Search Engine Optimization

Contrary to SEM, SEO uses the unpaid and natural process of promoting content on SERPs. This includes keyword research and placement, link building and social media marketing.

Social Media Marketing

Based on its name, social media marketing is the process of promoting a website through various social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest and more.

Why Internet Marketing is Important?

The Internet has the power to connect millions of people from around the world. Thus, it also has the capabilities to bring your business to millions of your target market worldwide. What makes this process the best inclusion to your promotional effort is the fact that you don’t need to shell out plenty of money.

In addition, the effectiveness of your campaign can be easily measured using web analytics and cost-volume-profit analysis tools. However, it requires you to learn the many facets of Internet marketing so that you’ll know whether your efforts are giving the return on investment that you want for your business.