If you run a business and have your own website up and running on the internet, you will have no doubt looked into the murky world of digital marketing. With so many different forms of internet marketing available to business owners such as yourself, the sheer wealth of options and amount of information can be very daunting and confusing. Internet marketing, however, is absolutely vital for any business in the modern age so we’ve put together some brief and concise information on the different internet marketing solutions available to you.
Search engine optimisation
Search engine optimisation, otherwise known as SEO, is probably the most popular and sought-after internet marketing solution. Put simply, search engine optimisation is the process of optimising a website in order to increase its visibility in the search engine results for a particular keyword or set of keywords. For example, if you sell basketball shoes you will want your website to appear at the top of Google for keywords such as ‘basketball shoes’ or ‘trainers for basketball’.
Search engine optimisation success is easier to gauge than other internet marketing solutions as you have a visible results chart in front of you, in the form of the search engine results pages (SERPs). It can also give one of the highest returns on investment of any of the internet marketing solutions due to its organic and trusting nature.
Pay-per-click Advertising
Pay-per-click advertising is not to be confused with search engine optimisation – they are both very different internet marketing solutions. Pay-per-click advertising deals with the paid-for links which you will see appearing in the orange box at the top of Google results pages as well as down the side of the organic results. Advertisers pay a fee to Google each time someone clicks on one of their adverts, hence the name pay-per-click. This form of internet marketing solution is good for bringing in quick results but can be a lot more expensive than search engine optimisation, in the long run, so is not a long-term internet marketing solution.
Email Marketing
Email marketing consists of what many people might consider to be ‘spam’, but when utilised in a careful and controlled manner it can be one of the most effective internet marketing solutions available to you. Essentially, email marketing involves targeting a group of potential customers using the medium of email. Even your regular company newsletter could be considered to be email marketing, as you are reinforcing your brand in the minds of your customers and advertising your products and services to them. Email marketing is still huge, with firms in the US alone spending $1.51bn on email marketing in 2011. This is not an internet marketing solution which is dying out, either: this figure is widely expected to rise to $2.5bn by 2016.
Referral Marketing
Referral marketing is one of the oldest forms of marketing around and isn’t even particularly new to the web. Essentially, this form of internet marketing solution relies on the most successful form of advertising: word of mouth. Referral marketing rewards customers and users for talking about and promoting the services of the company, usually in the form of a cash reward. Many companies who offer complimentary services have referral marketing schemes in place, whereby Company B will provide a percentage ‘kickback’ to Company A on receipt of a new customer sign-up thanks to their recommendation. Companies such as Dropbox and Gmail have begun their product launches with ‘invite only’ systems, which is in effect a referral marketing scheme.
There are many other forms of internet marketing solutions, but most fall under one of the above categories. You should ensure that you employ the services of a professional internet marketing company who can provide you with even more information on the possibilities available to you and can advise you as to which internet marketing solutions would work best for your particular company in your specific industry. There are a number of internet marketing experts around who are able to help and take care of the legwork for you in helping to ensure that your internet marketing activities are successful. In short, there is no ‘golden key’ to internet marketing: different internet marketing solutions are best for different people, and finding out which is best for you is something which must be decided through talking through your options with an internet marketing solutions company and through your own trial and error.
You should also take care not to put all your eggs in one basket. Search engine optimisation might work fantastically at one point of the year but you may also find that referral marketing provides a greater ROI (return on investment) at another time. Consistent testing and trial and error is the best way to make sure you are maximising your profits online.
In terms of tracking the success of your chosen internet marketing solutions, software packages such as Google Analytics are perfect for finding out where your visitors have come from. This not only enables you to see which of your campaigns is most effective, but it can also help highlight weaknesses which you may be able to fix and capitalise on. Analytics packages provide a wealth of useful information and should be studied carefully and regularly in order to ensure that you, as the business owner, is always kept abreast of what works and what doesn’t in terms of your internet marketing solutions.
