About one third of world’s population uses the Internet. This is a natural part of our everyday lives at home, work and in spare time. As the Internet is now such a common thing it has caused a situation where traditional media channels lose their market share to Internet and new media. Internet has become the number one marketing channel in UK and USA and is the fastest growing media channel.
At a local level, the proliferation of the Internet has caused many problems. A decade ago, people didn’t know what Internet marketing was or why they should care about it. Today, however, everybody is concerned with Internet marketing opportunities and channels. There are many service providers and each one of them offers their own services – websites, SEO, banner ads, social media, mobile marketing, adwords, etc. Entrepreneurs need to see the whole Internet marketing package and not focus on only one opportunity. In this post I focus on all main Internet marketing opportunities with short descriptions.
There are eight Internet marketing channels:
• Website
• Display ads
• Paid advertising on search engines
• SEO
• Social media
• Mobile marketing
• Analytics
Website
website Image
Most entrepreneurs and business owners should have reached an understanding that a great website is the core of an Internet marketing strategy. This is the environment where information is shared, client habits are learned through analytics, and new orders are received. How great! But what is a good website and how does it cost?
There are numerous service providers who all tell their own story. Some emphasize design, some praise their own CRM, some talk about SEO and fewer about analytics and conversion. Let’s make one thing clear – according to Google latest algorithm update, it all counts! It’s like building a house where you cannot argue which one is more important – a door, a window or the roof?
The main purpose of a company website is to be the promotional and sales channel. You gain a little benefit of a bling-bling design and pretty pictures when your website is not visible on search. The internet is cruel – from millions of websites the potential client must find yours! Moreover, if they find your website, they can leave immediately if your website is not impressive enough.
The time has passed where you could save your business with a budget website. My opinion – if you do something, put real effort and invest beyond tomorrow. A website is like your virtual office. But when we analyze where businesses invest their money it’s rather their physical office not their virtual one although the virtual office gets a lot more visitors.
If the budget is tight, you can think about do-it-yourself. It’s more time consuming but with enough dedication you get knowledge that helps to avoid potential mistakes in the future that may occur when ordering a website.
Advice: If you build a website, keep in mind the long perspective. Imagine the website to be your office and will mostly likely need a redesign in the future.
Display Ads
Display ads have historically been one of the first Internet marketing channels (first banner ad appeared in 1994). that are widely used today as well. Banners Photo Editing Services are mainly used to communicate fast marketing message to wide audience. Big news sites and portals enable to choose your target audience quite precisely.
Some service providers deal with display ad exchange which makes managing the ads easier. For example, AdSense enables to adapt the ad with the page content and the advertisers have no need to search all the webpages that correspond to their ad content.
Display ads are effective when the budget is big enough. Consumers have developed banner blindness against internet ads and they find the ads annoying.
Advice: When you use display ads, make sure to measure results. The service provider may present the results in a good light but as we know you’d better check than have a blind trust.
Paid Search Advertising
The easiest way to achieve top rankings on search is paid advertising. It’s called PPC (pay-per-click) and is an effective promotional tool in many fields. The success depends on ad optimization.
You need to analyze the results and make sure to keep low costs with maximum benefit. There are millions of search queries made every day on Google, Bing, Yandex and other popular search engines.
More than 90% of users never watch beyond first search result page. So make sure your ads are on first page when using paid advertising. Read more about how Google PPC advertising works.
Advice: Use paid advertising to make a market survey. Ads help you to find out what keywords/products/services are more effective (competing) and which one are not. Optimize your ads not according to click-thru rate but by efficiency – which ads bring real value, sales and queries?