Are you struggling to boost the visibility of your business and reach the right audience?
Do you find it hard to retain your customers and cultivate loyalty for your brand?
Are you constantly grappling with suboptimal returns on your marketing investment?
If you resonate with these challenges, then it is the time to upgrade your marketing approach and tap into the potential of internet marketing.
According to Global Overview Report of DataReportal, approximately 64.4% of the world’s population is online.
With nearly around two-third of global population spending significant time online, internet marketing presents an excellent opportunity for businesses to connect and engage with potential buyers, generate quality leads, and build a loyal fan base. Additionally, by implementing the effective internet marketing or digital marketing strategy, companies can achieve a higher ROI.
In our exploration of internet marketing, we will delve deep into its types, benefits and uncover strategies that convert clicks into customers.
Let’s commence with the basics:
2. What is Internet Marketing?
Internet marketing refers to the promotion of a business and its products or services through digital channels such as social media, email, search engines, and more. It is also known as online or web-based marketing, which enables organisations to reach prospective customers, establish authority, drive traffic, generate leads, and boost sales.
Here are the different types of the internet or digital marketing with a quick overview of how they work –
2.1 Types of Internet Marketing
Businesses can choose different ways to market business online, depending upon their niche and goals. This section reveals various internet marketing types to consider –
1. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
SEO is the set of practices and techniques that improve your website rankings on search engines like Google and Microsoft Bing. It involves identifying the right keywords, optimising web pages, building external links, improving site speed and crawlability, and creating high-quality content that addresses the target audience’s interest. Targeted SEO method helps business owners reach their target audience, attract organic traffic, and generate qualified leads.
2. Social Media Marketing
In this type of marketing, businesses utilise social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram to engage the target audience and promote products or services. Social media marketing is of two types – organic social media marketing, where you share content to interact with users, and paid social media marketing, where you pay to promote existing posts or advertise products/services. Sharing engaging content on social media helps you build a stronger bond with your audience, grow more followers, and convert them into customers.
3. Email Marketing
Email marketing involves sending targeted messages in the form of emails to potential customers to promote products or services, convey information, or build relationships. The key components of email marketing include understanding customer’s interest, segmenting them based on demographics, interests or purchasing behaviour, and personalising content based on individual recipient preferences. When done correctly, it helps businesses nurture leads and convert them into customers.
4. Content Marketing
It is a strategic marketing approach that involves creating and distributing engaging, informative, and relevant content. Content comes in numerous forms, including, but not limited to, blog posts, infographics, videos, books, and podcasts. To achieve the desired results through content marketing strategy, your copies and graphics should be well-researched, unique, easy to read and distributed to the right channels. Effective content strategy builds credibility, drives sales, and boosts loyalty.
5. Influencer Marketing
In this form of marketing, businesses collaborate with influencers – individuals who have a significant social media following and are viewed as experts within their niche, for increased brand exposure. There are four types of influencers Mega (1M+ following), Macro (100k-1M following), Micro (10k-100k following), and Nano (<10k following). By promoting a brand’s products or services in their social channels, influencers help establish credibility and trust, boost brand awareness, and attract quality leads.
6. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a performance-based marketing strategy in which a business rewards affiliates or third-party publishers for each customer brought by affiliate marketing efforts. Typically, affiliates earn commissions for a sale; however, in some affiliate marketing programs, rewards can be earned even by generating leads, increasing clicks to a website, or getting app downloads. Affiliate marketing is a win-win situation for both merchants and affiliates. Merchants benefit from increased sales and exposure, while affiliates can earn income.
7. Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC)
PPC or paid media advertising is a form of internet marketing in which advertisers pay every time their ad is clicked. When your PPC campaign works optimally, the fee paid is trivial because the click is worth more than what you paid. There are different types of paid media ads, such as display ads, text ads, and video ads, which appear on search engines, websites, social media platforms, and more. PPC is one of the effective strategies to drive more leads, boost new signups and conversions.
2.3 Key Benefits of Internet Marketing
With internet marketing, you can connect with customers using their preferred communication channels and drive conversions. Some of the critical advantages of using internet marketing include:
1. Enables Businesses to Reach Global Audience
Traditional marketing methods such as billboards, TV ads and cold sales have geographical limitations. However, with internet marketing strategies like social media, paid ads, and content marketing, businesses can reach a diverse global audience across different locations and time zones. This enables brands to tap into the markets that were previously inaccessible, widen the customer base, and expand on an internal scale.
2. Saves Cost Compared to Traditional Methods
Digital marketing methods such as social media campaigns, SEO, and email marketing can be more budget-friendly than traditional avenues like print ads or TV. Moreover, internet marketing allows businesses to precisely allocate budget to the specific target audience and optimise campaigns in real-time, resulting in more efficient use of resources. In addition, these cost-effective marketing solutions enable small-scale organisations to compete with high-turnover companies.
3. Facilitates Precise Targeting of Audience
According to statistics, “74% of marketers say targeted personalisation increases customer engagement.”
Reaching the right people is vital to generate results through your marketing campaigns. With internet marketing, businesses can precisely target the people interested in their products or services. While using targeted SEO or email marketing, brands can create buyer personas and attract prospects who will likely buy your products. When running Facebook or Google Ads campaigns, they can define the audience by attributes such as age, gender, hobbies, and more. This way, companies can obtain qualified leads that convert.
4. Creates Personalised User Experience
According to a study, New Epsilon research indicates that 80% of consumers are more likely to purchase when brands offer personalised experiences.
The number clearly indicates that personalised marketing is a key for brands to remain competitive and satisfy clients. Internet marketing leverages key user data such as purchase history, demographics, browsing behaviour, preferences, and more to get deep insights into the target audience’s needs. With this, businesses can provide relevant content to the users at the right time, enhancing their experience, increasing conversions and fostering loyalty.
5. Improves Brand Visibility & Recognition
The multifaceted approach of internet marketing, encompassing content creation, SEO optimisation, influencer collaborations, and strategic online engagements, collectively works to enhance a brand’s visibility and recognition. This not only ensures that the brand is easily discoverable by its target audience but also establishes a positive and memorable impression, fostering long-term relationships with customers.
6. Helps to Track & Measure Results
With internet marketing, you can easily track all touchpoints users have with your brand. From monitoring website visits and analysing time spent on web pages to gauging social media views, engagement metrics, ad clicks, and email open rates, every facet of digital marketing is highly measurable. This granular level of analytics enables companies to monitor the ROI of the marketing campaigns and direct their investments in the right channels.
7. Allows Quick Testing and Iteration
With traditional marketing, you cannot change once your flyers or billboards are set up. However, online marketing allows you to test different strategies swiftly and make data-driven decisions. With methods like A/B testing, businesses can experiment with variations of web copies, email and ads to determine what resonates best with the audience. This agility in testing and iteration ensures that marketing efforts are optimised to deliver maximum impact and achieve desired results.
Moving further to the last segment of this blog, here are the key steps to create the best digital marketing strategy –
4. Steps to Create the Best Internet Marketing Strategy
Here is step-by-step approach that businesses can adapt to develop an effective and result-driven online marketing strategy-
1. Define Business Objectives
The first step to creating an effective Internet marketing strategy is to define business objectives. It involves understanding the long-term vision of the company and setting SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound) goals that align with it.
For example, for a SaaS based company, the goals can be to improve online presence, drive customer acquisition, and foster loyalty. Once you have established the goals, the next step includes defining the KPIs that align with these business objectives.
2. Understand your Target Audience
Once you have determined your goals and KPIs, the next step involves understanding the target audience. This involves a thorough analysis of potential customers encompassing demographics, pain points, preferences and behaviours. Once you have this information, you can create buyer personas.
Buyer personas are fictional representations of potential customers based on market research and data. These personas serve as foundation for tailoring marketing messages and selecting the most effective channels. It further facilitates the development of impactful strategy that enables you to achieve your desired goals.
3. Perform Market Analysis
Conducting market analysis involves assessing SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) for your business. This encompasses identifying market trends, potential challenges, and opportunities. In addition, you can perform a detailed competitor analysis to identify their market strategies.
Moreover, you can also evaluate competitors’ keywords, the marketing channels they are using, the engagement they are getting on social channels, the types of ads they are running, etc. With this information, you can position your brand effectively and identify opportunities for differentiation.
4. Choose the Right Channels
Depending upon your target audience and market analysis, you can select the most appropriate online market channels. You can consider platforms where your audience is more active and receptive to your message. This could include social media channels like LinkedIn, search engines like Google, and other platforms like email marketing.
In addition, the channel selection also depends on the nature of your business. For example, effective marketing channels for an app development company (B2B business) can be LinkedIn and email. While, for a fashion brand (B2C business), the right channels can be Facebook, Instagram, and Google Ads.
5. Map Out the Strategy
This step involves creating a coherent marketing strategy based on the established business goals, KPIs, competitor analysis and chosen marketing channels. You can develop a comprehensive plan that outlines the specific activities for each targeted channel. It is also crucial to maintain a cohesive brand image across all channels to ensure consistency and reinforce brand identity
For example, a handmade jewellery store aiming to boost awareness and increase online sales can incorporate SEO (to boost online visibility), establish presence on social media by showcasing visually appealing images of jewellery and run targeted campaigns on Google or Facebook to convert customers.
6. Create Targeted Content
Creating tailored content that addresses the needs and interests of your target audience is imperative to engage them and boost conversions. You can develop content strategy that caters to each stage of the buyer’s journey and drives prospects from the awareness and engagement stage to the consideration and conversion stage.
Additionally, you can define content themes, key messages and tailor the content format to the channels you are targeting. For example, visual content can be shared on channels like Instagram, webinars, or tutorials can be posted on YouTube, while in-depth articles are suitable for website.
7. Implement the Campaign
Once you have developed an effective strategy and created personalised content, the next step is to implement the campaign. This includes defining the specific campaign you intend to run such as product launch, promotional offers, seasonal campaigns or any other initiatives aligned with business objectives.
Next, you can specify various tactics and activities and establish a detailed timeline for marketing initiatives that will be executed in the coming weeks, months, and quarters. Finally, you can determine the resources that would be required for successful implementation, including personnel, budget and technology.
8. Monitor and Optimise
Regularly monitoring and optimising your internet marketing strategy is crucial to identify areas of improvement and ensure that you achieve the overarching business goals.
This includes utilising analytics tools and marketing automation software to gather insights on various KPIs like website traffic, conversions, and email open rates.
For example, a fashion brand running Google Ads for its latest winter collection can track KPIs such as conversion rate, clickthrough rate, and cost per click to track the performance of an ad campaign. Furthermore, they can utilise this information to make data-driven decisions and optimise campaigns for enhanced marketing ROI.
This is all about building a result-driven internet marketing strategy. Now, let’s understand the role of digital marketing agency in the process:
5.How can a Digital Marketing Agency Help?
A digital marketing agency can help you formulate a performance-driven internet marketing strategy that aligns with your business goals. They help you define the KPIs, understand the target audience, determine right marketing channels and develop effective marketing tactics.
Growth Ganik is a full-stack digital marketing agency specialising in building performance-driven internet marketing strategy, harnessing the power of data and analytics. Whether your goal is to achieve brand recognition, enhance customer experience or drive conversions, our team can create custom strategy that caters to your needs.
Why wait, then? Book a free 45-minute consultation with our experts to discuss your requirements.
