When it comes to increasing the revenue of your business or making more profit, the first thing that comes to mind is acquiring new customers. And how are you going to do it? Well, for most people acquiring new customers for their business is related to marketing. But what is marketing, and in the world of the Internet, what type of marketing is more successful? Well, for starters, right now, the most effective way to get more customers for your business is by marketing your products, company, and services online.
Here in this article, we are going to help you find out the true meaning of online marketing. Besides, we will talk about what are the different forms of online marketing and how it is different from traditional offline marketing. So let’s begin.
Understanding Online Marketing and its Various Forms
How Does Online Marketing Work?
The World Wide Web (WWW) gives us the opportunity to market our resources to customers who are sitting on the other side of the world, and still, they can be turned into our customers if we can influence them correctly.
The market for online marketing is ever-growing. Every few months, there are changes in the algorithms, and you will have to start fresh to get yourself recognized online. The online marketing message could be sent to a customer in the form of simple text, image, video, email, etc. All of these messages are present in the distribution.
You can send it over to the social media feed to grab the attention of the user who loves to scroll social media to acquire new information about their friends, family, colleagues, brands, and celebrities. Or you can create a much more comprehensive strategy that includes multiple layers of marketing such as social media, email marketing, website creation, YouTube ads, and more.
History of Online Marketing
With the use of online marketing, you will be able to reach a much higher audience in a short amount of time. The technological advances have made it easier for marketers to have considerable attribution of the customer base of traditional marketing agencies along with departments. The real boost in online marketing came when mobile phones started having the Internet and intelligent apps. That’s when the actual use case of online marketing could be seen.
1990
Today, one of the most frequently used things that we have with us right now is a smartphone. No matter what you do or what you study, you need to have a smartphone to get things done, and online marketing allows marketers to showcase products directly on your smartphone, the one thing you see most in a full-day stretch. But how did we end up here? Well, it all started in the 1990s when digital marketing or online marketing was first used. The online age of marketing took off with the expansion of the Internet and the development of the Web 1.0 platform. Web 1.0 allowed tons of users to find the information they were looking for while sitting in the comfort of their homes, college libraries, and more.
1993
Then in 1993, the very first form of clickable banner got live on the Internet. Right after that, HotWired, a company, purchased a few banners for their advertising. This was the first step in the transition from old-school offline marketing to online marketing. With the gradual shift in the online world in 1994, we saw new technologies being a part of the digital marketplace. This was the same year that Yahoo! was formed.
1998
Google was born in 1998, and with that, Microsoft also launched its search engine MSN. After two years of all this, the Internet bubble exploded, and all the other search engines that used to work before we’re left behind or wiped out completely. This created a much more open space for sophisticated search engines like Google, MSN, Yahoo!, and others.
2006
In 2006 online marketing saw its first high surge in the number of companies and individuals investing their money in it. That is because, in the same year, the online traffic of search engines grew by about 6.4 billion searches in a single month.
2009
By 2009 we could see some of the social platforms that we are now using started to pop on the Internet. One of the most famous video streaming websites on the Internet called, YouTube, was also launched in the same year. With Web 2.0, the Internet was introduced with cookies that played an essential role in the online marketing industry as they helped online marketers to capitalize on the fledgling technology. The first cookie was designed in such a way that it can record the user’s habits. The use of cookies has changed over the years. The cookies we are using on today’s Internet are coded to offer marketers a number of ways to collect literal user data.
Different Types of Online Marketing
There are a total of eight different types of online marketing techniques that you should know about if you are planning to make a career in it. Or use it to grow your business.
1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
The goal every marketer is trying to achieve with SEO is to get a higher ranking of their business’s official website in Google’s search results. This will ultimately increase the traffic to your website and give you more online business. There are tons of ways by which marketers can get a higher rank. The most common method for achieving a higher rank is by using specific keywords in your website’s content.
2. Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
PPC refers to the paid advertisements that you get to see on search engines when you are searching for a query on it. This is a short-term form of online marketing. What this means is as long as you are paying, the ads will run. Once you stop doing it, the ads will disappear from the search engine. Just like SEO, PPC is also used to increase the search traffic to your business. One thing that makes PPC different from SEO is that you are paying for the results. You only pay when someone clicks on your website or your website is seen on the web results.
3. Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is all about what companies do on multiple social media channels. Everything related to marketing you do on social media can be represented under the umbrella of social media marketing. Social media is more than just creating posts for your followers and getting likes from them. You need to have a proper content strategy, roadmap, and, most of all, consistency to get more followers from your niche on social media websites.
Social media marketers don’t need to run their own thing and separate themselves from the rest of the marketing team. They need to work in coordination with the other members of the team and come up with a reliable and efficient social media marketing campaign that is in line with the other marketing peripherals that the company is working on.
4. Content Marketing
Content marketing is all about telling the story of your brand in such a way that it makes a significant impact in the minds of your customers. The ultimate goal of content marketing is to make readers take action towards becoming a customer. It could be asking for more information about the product they just read about, signing up for the email, or making a purchase of the product. Content marketing is a bit special as it works in the form of symbiosis with the other forms of online marketing. It is one of the best ways a person could incorporate SEO search terms into the website’s content. The same content created by them could be shared on social media platforms also to attract new followers.
5. Email Marketing
Even though you think social media marketing is more impactful due to a large number of users being active on it. The truth is, that email marketing is still the most effective way for any business to acquire new customers and sell new products to their old customers. Email marketing can easily fit into your content marketing strategy. People who have gained experience in email marketing know how to write a compelling campaign that could easily reach a large number of potential customers.
Email marketing will help you in taking strategic decisions based on the metrics of how well your email marketing campaign has performed. Emails could be used to develop a sense of urgency, personalize your email, and let the recipient set their preferences as to how they want to receive your email and how often they wish to receive along with many other functionalities of marketing as well.
6. Mobile Marketing
As we said earlier, the thing which is close to us every hour of the day is our smartphone. People are spending more than five hours a day on their phones to get work done, watch videos, learn, play video games, and for other forms of entertainment purposes. In addition to this, more and more people are spending a lot of their time on applications rather than using them as a mini-computer to browse the Internet.
As a result, putting your ads on applications such as Netflix, Hulu, Instagram, Facebook, and more has become crucial for almost every business. Mobile marketing is used to reach new customers via text messages. Now things have changed, and you can get more people through social media ads, email marketing campaigns, and even ad banners that are present in the applications.
7. Marketing Analytics
One of the most significant advantages of using online marketing is that you can measure the results of your ads. Everything is online marketing is trackable and measurable. With the help of marketing analytics, one can track user behavior and how they respond to the discounts and offers that you provide them with. The thing with online marketing analytics is that if you are not sure how to analyze it properly. You will end up in a situation where you are drinking water from the fire hose. As a marketer, you genuinely need to understand the meaning of data and the type of information it is providing.
The marketing analytics will also allow marketers to know what makes consumers buy a product and what message makes a customer move down the sales cycle. With the understanding of all these analytics and data, one can take better strategic decisions and even create efficient marketing campaigns to increase your online presence at the same time.
8. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is also known as influencer marketing. With time, it has grown to be more popular than ever. Besides, more and more people from the younger generation are coming online for the first time. The first thing they would do is create a social media account and follow those people they like, idealize, and want to learn from them. This resulted in affiliate marketing filling the gap between the consumer and the product.
Affiliate marketing utilizes the growing popularity of industry experts and social media influencers. These third-party influencers will collaborate with a company and promote their products to their followers. In return, they will ask for a commission or compensation. Cristiano Ronaldo, the footballing legend, is also quite famous off the field. He has the most followers on Facebook and Instagram.
As a result, when he posts something online about a brand or a company, the sales of that particular company increase exceptionally. But in return, the company has to provide Cristiano Ronaldo with a massive fee. It was found out that the money he is making from social media and other online marketing platforms is more than the money he is making on the field playing football.
Conclusion
So this is what online marketing is all about; it is a pretty vast field of computer science and marketing. So it cannot be adequately explained in a single article. We tried including all the crucial aspects of online and how it came into existence in the first place. For more information, make sure you visit our website and learn more about different forms of online marketing thoroughly. Till then, happy learning!
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Simran works as a technical writer. The graduate in MS Computer Science from the well known CS hub, aka Silicon Valley, is also an editor of the website. She enjoys writing about any tech topic, including programming, algorithms, cloud, data science, and AI. Traveling, sketching, and gardening are the hobbies that interest her.
