What is Online Marketing? Online marketing is the promotion of a brand, product or service on the internet. To increase brand awareness or to generate extra turnover. Today there are many ways in which online marketing can be used. Some examples are content marketing, search engine optimization and social media marketing. In this article you can read what online marketing is, which different marketing activities you can distinguish and what the benefits of online marketing are for an organization.
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What is Online Marketing?
Online marketing is a branch of marketing in which marketing activities take place online, i.e. on the internet. Online marketing is also popularly referred to as internet marketing, digital marketing or growth hacking. The marketing activities are used to bring a brand, product or service to the attention of a (potential) customer or target group. This with the aim of increasing brand awareness or achieving more sales. By being there wherever the target group is, with messages that appeal In online marketing, the online marketer strives to convey a message in an effective, activating and measurable way. Some examples of online marketing are personalized advertisements, findability in search engines such as Google, email marketing and social media posts. You can read more about these different components later in this article.
Wat is offline marketing?
Online marketing is, not surprisingly, the counterpart of offline marketing. These are marketing activities that do not take place via the internet. Some examples of offline marketing include billboards, radio and television advertising, and addressed mail. Many organizations use a combination of online and offline marketing to further promote brand identity, recognizability and visibility.
Forms of online marketing
Online marketing is a collective name for various marketing activities that take place in the online world. Search engines, social media or e-mail: each channel has its own marketing discipline. Depending on the marketing needs within an organization, the following forms of marketing are used:
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Content marketing
- Socialmediamarketing
- Affiliate Marketing
- Email marketing
- Display marketing
- Search advertising
Online marketing strategy
Successful online marketing starts with devising a good strategy. Before organizations actually get started with online marketing activities, they must first determine the strategy. This plan, often part of a total marketing strategy, answers a number of crucial questions. Who is the target group? Where and how can we best reach them? What do we want to communicate? What is our message? What is our goal and what exactly do we want to achieve? And what is our budget? By properly researching and mapping these matters in advance, you can then get started with the most efficient use of online marketing.
Advantages of online marketing
Why should you as an organization be involved in online marketing? The answer is very simple: because your customer or target group is increasingly online. This does not mean that offline marketing such as radio and television advertising or personalized mail is no longer useful. Studies show that these are still very effective means. However, it is also a fact that digital development is moving at lightning speed and people are increasingly obtaining their news, information and purchases digitally. And that is where online marketing comes into play. Below we list the advantages of online marketing:
Be where your customer is
We just touched on it: we are all online more and more often. We communicate via social media, often get our ‘news’ from there and get inspiration for possible choices and purchases. Does your organization have an offer that perfectly meets the needs of the customer or target group? Online marketing offers the opportunity to draw attention to your product or service. By showing personalized advertisements, showing relevant social media messages and responding to the customer’s search intention with search engines such as Google and Bing.
It is low-threshold and affordable
Promoting a product or service can be done in different ways. The advantage of online marketing is that it is relatively inexpensive. Not every organization can roll out a radio or television campaign or claim a billboard along the A2. Then writing blogs, posting social media messages and sending personalized e-mails is a lot more accessible! When you are knowledgeable and know how the online ‘game’ works, you can achieve great results even with a small budget.
The results are measurable
Many companies tend to focus solely on costs when it comes to marketing spend. At least as interesting is the question: what does it yield? The advantage of online marketing is that you get a lot of information about what it yields at the bottom. An example: if you, as an organization, have a thousand brochures printed with a discount coupon in it, it is difficult to find out where those brochures ultimately ended up. Online marketing, on the other hand, provides insight into the behavior of the potential customer or target group. For example, you can compare the number of visitors to a website, for example from a sales page or webs hop, against the number of actual sales. Statistics can tell a lot about where customers drop out or what works.