What is Online Marketing?
Online marketing is the practice of promoting a business, a product, or a service through various internet channels. The key features of online marketing include inexpensive cost, attainability, personalization, and easy monitoring, measuring, and testing. Anyone can do online marketing, as long as they have a business, work for a business, or freelance for a business. Local lead generation is an example of an online business that thrives on online marketing. Other examples of online marketing include anything internet-based. (An example of offline marketing is a billboard or TV commercial.)
Online Marketing Definitions
- What is marketing? Marketing is the practice of creating materials that promote a business to potential consumers for a profit. Marketing is not the same as selling, because selling is when the customer purchases the product while marketing is the promotion of that product. Sell a product by pushing the consumer through your customer experience. Promote a product by setting up targeted ad campaigns or by creating an Instagram page.
- What is inbound marketing? Inbound marketing attracts people to a business, while outbound marketing involves reaching out directly to customers. Online marketing includes both inbound and outbound strategies.
- What is online marketing strategy? An online marketing strategy is a structured plan designed by marketers and/or business owners to use internet resources to promote their product or service. For example, a TikTok dropshipper needs a unique angle and marketing strategy to drive online traffic to their offers.
- What is digital marketing? Digital marketing is the promotion of goods and/or services through the use of digital means, though it does not necessarily include the use of the Internet. The difference between internet marketing and digital marketing is that internet marketing (or online marketing) must only use the Internet, while digital marketing may include other strategies like radio advertising. Digital marketing is important for your business because it opens up another world, meeting customers who spend their time in the digital world rather than hoping to pull sales by more traditional, offline means.
As a result, many companies now hire a digital marketing agency to help them increase brand awareness and connect with potential customers. Digital marketing evolved from traditional marketing as more consumers spent most of their time on the Internet. Companies like HotWired implemented clickable banner ads in 1993, and 5 years later, Google began. - What is marketing automation? Marketing automation is the use of software to manage your marketing campaigns. There are many marketing automation tools, like HubSpot.
An online marketing definition by authors is: “a set of activities that a company or person runs on the internet in order to attract new businesses and develop a brand identity,” - Philip Kotler, father of modern marketing.
Other Online Marketing Terms
B2B marketing is a strategy where businesses promote their goods or services to another business. B2C marketing is a strategy where businesses promote their goods or services to consumers. Digital marketing differs for B2B and B2C marketing by their major goals. Typically, B2B marketing promotes software or services and aims to build lasting relationships with other businesses. B2C marketing pushes products or services that serve or delight the consumer. The marketing tactics will be different depending on who the target audience is. B2B and B2C marketing may use several marketing strategies, including both social media marketing and email marketing.
Online marketers are individuals who develop online campaigns for brands. Online marketers do analytics, analysis, operate within a team, optimize social media, recruit bloggers, develop promotions, write copy and emails, create or plan video content, and many more tasks.
The role of a product marketing manager is to delegate promotional campaigns and monitor the marketing of a brand, the development of the product, and sales as they come in.
Marketing ROI is the return earned when you compare revenue and total marketing cost. Ideally, your revenue will be higher than what you spent to promote that revenue. You calculate marketing ROI by subtracting sales growth by marketing cost and then dividing by that same marketing cost.
What are the Main Types of Online Marketing?
- Email marketing is a marketing strategy that uses email to promote brands to potential and/or existing customers through emailed newsletters, unique offers, and reminders. The most important objective of email marketing is building familiarity and trust between the business and the consumer through information and engaging content. Personalization in email marketing means using the data you have collected on a potential customer to create targeted marketing material.
- Content marketing is a major part of any marketing strategy because you have to create content for each type of online marketing, and it is a popular option for people who want to make money as freelance writers. Content marketing includes blogs, webinars, videos, graphics, eBooks, podcasts, and even emails. Content helps drive sales and bring in new customers by building an audience for the brand, spreading brand awareness, helps conversions, and answers questions.
- Search engine optimization (SEO): Search engine optimization is a marketing strategy that focuses on on-page SEO and off-page SEO. On-page SEO involves improving websites through copy writing so that it stands out to search engine crawlers. Optimizing user experience is a part of technical SEO. Off-page SEO involves backlinks and building relationships with other websites or influencers.
- Search engine marketing (SEM): Search engine marketing is also known as paid advertising. Often, digital marketers use pay-per-click strategies or Google AdWords to do search engine marketing.
- Affiliate marketing, or referral marketing, involves finding individuals who will promote your business for a commission or other perks. Affiliates may promote their affiliate link offers through blogs, YouTube videos, or even their own email marketing campaigns.
- Mobile marketing is the practice of reaching potential consumers through smart phones, using SMS marketing, apps, and more.
Types of Social Media Marketing
- Social media marketing (SMM): the act of promoting a brand on a social media platform. A business may hire a social media marketing agency to handle its social networks to increase brand awareness and connect with a wider audience.
- Instagram marketing is the practice of promoting a brand through photo and video on Instagram. Creating a social media post as a marketing strategy is popular with small businesses and Amazon sellers and influencers. Influencer marketing is another online marketing strategy. Note: Amazon is not online marketing- it is a platform on which you may sell products and use Amazon PPC ads and other means to promote those products.
- Facebook advertising is the use of video, image, and text ads place on Facebook to promote a business to customers according to age, location, and more. This social media marketing strategy works by creating ads (or outsourcing this content), choosing the demographic you wish to target, and paying a recurring amount that determines how much your ads are seen.
What are the Pros and Cons of Online Marketing?
What are the Advantages of Online Marketing?
Understanding where customers are coming from, and meet them in the space they exist
Strong reach in local areas as well as potential global reach
Less expensive than traditional marketing and allows a business owner to leverage remote closing to save money and connect with a global market
Collection of data allows you to provide better customer service
Better understanding of the customer journey
Improved conversion rates
Target specific groups of people, for example, leverage high ticket sales like a premium coaching program or all-inclusive vacation and earn more money with fewer leads
What are the Disadvantages of Online Marketing?
Other marketers can copy your ads
Potential that any mistake can be shared immediately
If you have technological problems, you’re out of luck
For some markets there is a high probability you’ll have to spend a lot of money on ads to stay ahead of the competition.
How to Start Online Marketing?
- Build an internet marketing strategy. Start building an internet marketing strategy by studying your competitors and potential customers. Observe what ads your competitors run and/or what kinds of online marketing they use. Create a strategy that will reach your customers in a better way than your competitors.
- To create and implement a digital marketing strategy, search for unanswered questions, hashtags, and Pinterest for inspiration. Then, decide where you want to conduct your marketing strategy. Will you use email marketing? Social media marketing? Both?
- Generate content, ads, or whatever campaign strategy you’ve decided to follow. You can do this yourself or outsource to virtual assistants.
- Follow your marketing campaign. Run A/B testing to determine which digital marketing methods are working. Adjust your marketing plan to focus on the most successful areas. Your company needs data on social media activity, transactional data, purchase history, point-of-sales data, and visits to other websites to better understand customer behavior and preferences. Maximize your ad spend returns by choosing lower cost digital marketing channels, like social media marketing or content writing.
How Much Money Do Online Marketers Make?
Online marketers make between $40,000 and $97,000 annually, though Indeed lists the average salary for a digital marketer in the United States at $60,245.
Digital marketing will cost your business between $2,000 and $100,000 monthly, depending on the size of your company and your marketing needs. A small business is typically cheaper, as these have a smaller audience. Thus, if you are an online marketer, scoring those bigger companies may help you earn more each year. But, with such an enormous commitment, you’ll probably have to employ a marketing team which will eat into your overall profits.
How Do People Make Money with Online Marketing?
People make money with online marketing by promoting the products, goods, and services offered through their business. There are other ways people can make money with marketing efforts without promoting their own products or services:
CONCLUSION: Is Local Lead Generation a Type of Online Marketing?
Local lead generation is another type of online marketing. With local lead generation, we use content marketing and organic SEO tactics to rank a website to the top of Google. The website promotes a local service, something needed by the people that live near the city or small town. Then, we rent out this digital asset to the businesses that need traffic.
