Online marketing can also be defined as Internet marketing or E-marketing. Here the products and services are marketed on the internet. There is very strong competition in the offline advertising world. The product ads cost more and though it is still one of the best mediums to market your product, it is getting saturated and companies are looking for better options. Online marketing is the process of promoting the growth of an organization via the internet. The online marketing promotes sales in the internet to ultimately boost their sales. Various marketing strategies are used for online marketing like online advertising of products and services, market research, email marketing and direct sales through the company website.
The biggest advantage of online marketing is that it is cost effective.
The companies can promote their products and services via the internet for very low budgets. Also the information and product is advertised to a global audience which would have otherwise cost a fortune with the regular advertising mediums. A unique feature of internet marketing is also the instant and interactive response to the advertisement. The number of clicks on the ad gives an immediate assessment of the number of people seeing the ad.
For online marketing the creative and technical aspects have to work together to boost sales and promote your product. There are various methods through which companies can market their product online. Some of them are search engine marketing, display advertising, e-mail marketing, affiliate marketing, interactive advertising and blog marketing.
Online marketing boosts sales by:
- Promoting and selling the product to a global audience
- It is a One-to-one approach. The user browsing the internet views the marketing advertisements personally. Especially, when the advertisements targeted to specific keywords searched by the user.
- Online marketers target the audience by their activities. For example display pictures or have blogs.
- Accuracy of the target response. One of the unique and best features of online marketing is that most aspects of the user’s response can be traced, measured, and tested. Usually a company would use the ‘pay per click’ option or email advertising. It makes it easier to measure the response they get in terms of what is more appealing to the audience. Hence they can alter their products or services accordingly.
- The advertiser gets the exact number of responses the viewers click. The viewer will be either totally interested in the product of will close the display box. Thus the advertiser gets immediate results.
Overall online marketing is an economic and easy way to advertise your product and services. It targets a much larger audience world wide. This results in growth of sales and decrease in the amount spent on promoting the product or service. Again with facilities to make easy payment online like online banking the user can easily save time and buy the product online and get it delivered to his or her door step. With companies selling more products on discounts and providing free delivery options, more users are likely to buy products.