With over half the world’s population wired in some way to the internet, this connectivity has created worldwide shifts in positioning, strategic thinking as well as changing how marketing is done. With each day that passes, some new service or product is presented that will revolutionize our lives and marketing that product or service is straight to the online world.
Target audience
Marketing always is the way to connect with your audience in the right place at the right time. You must find your niche group and plan online marketing to get the news of your new product or service to the right people who might be interested in it. This has changed the face of marketing.
Definition
A good definition of “online marketing” is marketing that uses online channels to distribute your advertising message about your services or products. Some of the methods you might use in marketing today include:
- Social media
- Paid ads
- Blogging
- Emails
- Search engine optimizing (SEO)
When building your marketing plan for the current age, you need to use all of these.
Goal of online marketing
An online marketer drives traffic to a website with the goal of generating more leads to your website where they can be converted into sales. This is done through the channels mentioned above as well as content marketing.
Cost of online marketing
You might be wondering how expensive online marketing is – it depends. It depends on whether you go after free traffic sources or paid traffic sources. With the free ones, you only need to put the time in. With paid ones, they do cost a fee, but many maintain that it is still cheaper than the marketing of old with:
- Magazine ads
- Radio spots
- TV commercials
You can usually optimize your site to make paid sources be very profitable. But it is still cheaper than getting the word out in the old marketing models.