An Introduction To Online Marketing And It's Advantages

By Author: Heather Protz
Total Articles: 46
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Online marketing or Internet marketing has contributed to a great extent in the expansion of the Internet domain. Online marketing maybe a relatively new form of advertising but it is rapidly expanding and helps develop businesses strategically. In the past few decades, online marketing has evolved into consisting of many components to help promote sales of offline, semi-online or completely online businesses.
It not only consists of marketing through email and display banners, but also advertising via social networking, e-commerce and affiliate marketing. Internet marketing is advantageous in terms of costs and measuring statistics easily and ineffectively. With online marketing, there is no need to expend money on unnecessary infrastructure. There are modes of online marketing through which you can advertise your products for free. The increasing number of ways of promoting sales in online marketing has enhanced customer satisfaction and service. With the availability of fast and affordable Internet like Charter Internet, online marketing has achieved a broader sense.
Essentially, online marketing is not just limited ...
... to promoting sales; it can add to the overall value of a business. For example, through online marketing you can increase the brand awareness, improve customer relationship or simply communicate a company’s message. Customers expect worthy businesses to own a website, so it indirectly increases the reliability and hence the quality of the business. Earlier, the term online marketing was restricted to placing display banners in a third party website for free or for a price. This is a form of online advertising that aims to divert traffic to your website.
At present, there are a number of ways through which you can promote your business online. Let’s take a look at the four core sub-branches of advertising:
Social media marketing: It’s one of the widely used marketing strategies that business sectors ranging from large scale to small scale employ these days. Social media marketing involves the usage of social networking or social media sites to advertise or enhance customer-provider relationship. This is especially useful for small scale businesses as you don’t require money to promote your business. In social media marketing there is an opportunity to include promotions, hold contests and spread brand awareness.
Email marketing: This is a direct way of marketing where the message reaches the targeted audience only. Email marketing involves sending an email from the merchant to the consumer including a message about ongoing offers, advertisements etc, either subtly or prominently in the mail. But from an indulgent perspective transaction receipts and newsletters can also be considered as modes of email marketing.
Pay per click: This is again an excellent marketing strategy. With the pay per click program you don’t have to use too much of your resources. Pay per click works in a simple way. You divert traffic to your website when the user clicks on the keywords related to your business. You have to pay the mediator only when the searcher clicks on the link.
Blog marketing: This is quite similar to social media marketing and again, is one of the widely used marketing tools in online advertising. In blog marketing you express your views and opinions, write reviews or comments and participate in discussions to strategically improve your business sales. There are free blogging platforms and clogging clouds where you can promote your business without spending money.
Of course, the list doesn’t stop there. Online marketing is an expanding platform and vendors have come up with many other ways that are employed in their marketing expertise. In merely a few decades the Internet has grown to a huge amount. With fast Internet connections like Charter Internet spreading their coverage to even rural areas, the number of Internet users worldwide keeps increasing by millions every day. Thus the Internet has become the most accessible and cost effective medium of advertising today.

Heather is a cheery, enthusiastic college student. As a freelancer, she likes to write about the advancements in the present day technology. She is interested in cooking, pottery, creative visualization, and browsing the Internet on her laptop conected to Charter Internet