You could barely imagine how it is exhausting and challenging to make regular product sales or service patronage before the coming of the world wide web. Products are often carried by hand by ambulant peddlers, and if you’re lucky enough to have a bicycle, one could place items behind the saddle mounted on customized hangers or using the handlebars as additional holders.
Traditional marketing is still alive today, but it has been overtaken by advancement in technology. The coming of the internet has paved the way for businesses to depend on online marketing. Unlike the usual telemarketing, sellers can communicate with clients or customers in real-time chat rooms and video meeting conferences.
What is online marketing?
Online marketing is the process of using the Internet to its maximum advantage in order to sell products or promote services. The web becomes a platform to inform potential customers of product launching, brand creation and development and creation of convenient services for the public.
Preliminaries of online marketing
- Brainstorming – if you want to succeed in online marketing, you should think of unique or extraordinary products or services to sell or promote online. If you find a gap, fill it in with fresh ideas or concepts and whenever there is a need, take every single step to grab the opportunity for your own benefit.
- Focus on content – if you feel that you have what it takes to convince people to believe in what you say, there’s no better way of writing and publishing it online. Content marketing increases a customer’s understanding of a product and guides him of its pros and cons.
- Creating a website – this opens the opportunity to generate sales revenues from your visitors or subscribers. Either it’s a free website or a customized and paid platform, you are going to engage customers by telling them that what they see is what they’ll get.
- Utilizing search engines – Publishing your business site gives you the opportunity to be seen online and more importantly, enabling or opening the settings for looking up products or services by other sites makes it easy for visitors to check what’s new on the menu.
- Establishing a good reputation online – While some websites may not be safe to browse because of fraudulent or unsafe transactions, make yours reputable by placing your professional image, educational background and other credentials including your primary email address and contact numbers.
- Following-up customers using e-mail – This is one great way of communicating with your customers. Apart from its formality and style, you’ve got to share files and other relevant information with great ease and confidence.
- Increasing your income – When you encourage online customers to buy a comparable higher-end product rather than the one in question, you’ve earned a pretty much higher income. This is what we call as upselling. Cross-selling, on the other hand, earns revenue by inviting customers to buy related or complementary items.
Types of online marketing
- Paid advertising like pay per click (PPM) and search engine marketing (SEM)
- Search engine optimization or SEO – this focuses on content marketing where relevant or helpful keywords are repeated several times in a text or article in order to be seen as a most essential option to click on Google.
- Email marketing – promotions and ads are sent electronically to almost all individuals with an address
- Affiliate marketing – the payment of commissions from sales leads and sales generation.
- Influencer marketing – focus is more on influential people rather than the target audience in the market.
- Social media marketing – advertisements on Facebook and product hashtags on Twitter are a few of the examples.
