Online Marketing

Every business can benefit from an effective Internet marketing strategy. Whether you are old economy or new economy, or a “clicks and bricks” combination of both, the Internet has already impacted on your business.  There’s no stopping the Internet. You can’t deny that it has become a part of many people’s lives and many are foregoing other traditional media for the internet. So how do you start to develop your Internet strategy? The first step in considering your Internet strategy is to identify the overall goals of the business, as happens in all traditional business and strategy planning. Once you have planned your overall strategic goals, you need to decide how your online Internet strategy can complement your off-line plans. Many are under the misconception that a web designer is an expert in the area of Internet marketing and that they are also well versed in search engine optimization. They are only met with disappointment. Do you know anyone who has experienced following problems:

• Minimal sales and conversion.
• Traffic to the site is not as expected or paid for traffic leads but still no conversion.
• Subscriptions to reports or newsletters that you offer are slim to none.
• You’ve received only minimal requests for services or products by email or telephone since your site launch.

How could these problems have been avoided? An Internet Marketing Strategy can help position you to your target and niche market as well as increase conversion by following the five levels of the sales process mentioned below. While the answer seems simple the process is a bit more involved but vital to the success of a business that is about to launch online. Marketing online is stretching marketing budgets for many companies. We are all looking for ways to marketing more efficiently and effectively along with saving as much money as possible. The solution? Evaluating marketing online. Marketing your business online brings with it many benefits that are not available with traditional and offline marketing.

• You can make changes on the fly: One benefit of marketing online versus offline marketing such as placing traditional advertisements in magazines, newspapers or on television is that you can change them on the fly. By monitoring and tracking how your advertisements and marketing efforts are doing you can make the decision to change a graphic or wording and do it without any problems. This is not the case with traditional marketing and advertising.
• You can track real-time results: Marketing online allows you to track real-time results using online analytics to make a determination on how your marketing campaign is performing. There are ways to track traditional marketing efforts, but most the time it cannot be done in real-time. This can mean success or failure to your campaign.
• You can target specific demographics in your advertising: Marketing online allows you to target specific demographics such as gender, age and location. You can even target specific income levels, education levels and occupation. You can do this in traditional marketing, but it’s not as easy and is often a guessing game.
• Variety of Methods: Marketing online including email, audio, video, blog, social media and newsletters. There are so many options when marketing online. You can use audio, video, blogging, email, social media and ongoing newsletters. If you were to do the same thing in traditional marketing you would need to select several media outlets to cover your bases, not so when it comes to marketing online.
• Instant Conversion Ability: When you market online you have the ability to convert a customer instantaneously. This is not the case when evaluating marketing options in traditional media such as magazine ads, newspapers or television. When you are marketing online you cannot only capture a potential customer’s information, but you can capture a sale instantaneously by a few clicks of a mouse, when it comes to offline marketing it takes more time to convert a customer into a sale not to mention the person power it often requires.