Post #5: What is Online Marketing?

Online marketing is a broad subject. It is everywhere and used by almost every business out there, and there is no escaping it. Through marketing, a business has the means of connecting with and reaching out to potential customers. In today’s world, 2.3 billion people have access to the internet, meaning they are clicks and seconds away from you. Just now, connecting to the Wi-Fi of Caribou Coffee a menu in the browser immediately popped up. Online marketing at its finest.

Online marketing has many facets. Being online gives you almost an infinitive range of possibilities and abilities. So how do you balance online marketing? A simple way that was broken down was the science and art treats of marketing. Science gives tools in reading and explaining data and other forms of measurement. However, art is what targets the human experience. Numbers do not catch our attention like bright colors and awesome pictures do. So why do you need both? We have a limited amount of resources and to understand how effective we are in using those resources we need to collect measurements. This is extra critical when you have a set budget and need to demonstrate how the worth of that budget. 

Another form of online marketing is in content marketing. Simply make helpful and useful content on your page that will encourage people to visit your site and visit repeatedly. One of the many benefits of this style of marketing is the fact that this is free. You are not paying for advertisements; you are creating content that is at its core desirable. This could be as simply as having a blog. Having this structure setup in the beginning will add to the success of all your other marketing techniques. It offers visitors a means to know the people behind the business a bit more. People might want to sign up for email updates of your resources, follow you on social media to stay up to date, and gives people something to share with others on social media platforms. This builds relationships, which builds trust.

Content management leads well into another helpful side of online marketing. This is search engine optimization or SEO. The idea here is to make your website as visible as possible without the need of getting ads. SEO is mainly rooted in having the background of your website built to allow the search engine to understand your website. Another area is using keywords and phrases in your content. When someone searches a word your product associates with, you want the search engine to think they are searching for your webpage.

Another technique used to increase traffic is advertisements. This is the most familiar part of online marketing. However, this will work much better after the above techniques of online marketing are complete. This is a simple process that many industries, such as Google and Facebook, have made very user-friendly. The greatest downside to this technique is you pay for it. Once you have a marketing plan that is running smoothly and efficiently, ads might be the next path for you. Using the above techniques will allow those who visit your site through advertisements a reason to stay and return.