Importance of Online Marketing

Today, the world’s attention is focused on internet; people of all ages, background, ethnic and social status are well attached to internet in one way or the other. It makes internet marketing or online marketing an indispensable modern way for corporate companies and individual business owners to improve their marketing reach, customer base, market share/sales volume and ultimately increase their profits. Online marketing is important because it aligns with the way consumers make purchasing decisions. Studies by analysts such as Gartner indicate that increasing numbers of consumers use social media and research on mobile Internet to carry out preliminary product and price research before making final decisions. Internet marketing enables you to build relations with customers and prospects through regular, low-cost personalized communication, reflecting the move away from mass marketing.

As you can see, effective online marketing is really a complex ecosystem of techniques that can help your firm achieve greater visibility and credibility. But let’s get even more specific. Consumers are increasingly turning to the Internet for their buying decisions. This makes Online marketing more important than ever before. According to studies, to carry out preliminary price and product research, consumers are turning to research on mobile internet and social media before making their final purchasing decisions. Through regular, affordable customized communication, you can build relationships with prospects and clients with Global Marketing or Online Marketing. This serves as a stark contrast to the days of mass marketing, a tactic that is slowly going extinct. In this blog, let us acquaint you with a few reasons as to why online marketing has become so important nowadays:

• Online Marketing Is Cost-Effective: Online marketing involves less or no start-up-capital. Marketing products through a physical retail outlet is much more expensive than marketing them on the Internet. You might start blog marketing, social media marketing, email marketing with less investment compared to traditional marketing which greatly lies on the factors of production – Land, capital, labour, entrepreneur.  The recurring costs of property maintenance and rental are not relevant to Internet Marketing. These are not prerequisite to online marketing and translate to reduced cost of production, advertising and marketing since no money is incurred on staffing, procurement of business premises and middlemen. Offline traditional marketing like newspaper, radio, television and banner may cost thousands of dollars while fraction of such can run PPC advertising on Facebook, Google and other PPC companies.

• Online Marketing Allows for Convenient Store Hours Convenient, Easy and Quick Service Delivery: Internet marketing enables you to be open for business around the clock without worrying about store opening hours or overtime payments for staff. Offering your products on the Internet is also convenient for customers. They can browse your online store at any time and place orders when it is convenient for them. Without having to worry about overtime payments to workers or opening hours, Internet marketing gives you the freedom to keep your enterprise open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Clients will also find it incredibly convenient to shop for your services and products on the Internet on their own schedule. When it is convenient for them, they can browse your ecommerce store at any time of day and place orders. Marketing online is incredibly convenient. It has easy accessibility. Consumers incur no cost in reaching the internet markets anywhere in the world. This removes the cost of transportation to purchase goods across borders. It is a great plus to importers as they make the online order right in the comfort of their home. Delivery process of sale items can easily be tracked online. Consumers get digital downloadable products on a click of mouse.

• Online Marketing Provides a Customized Advertising Approach: By building a profile of your customers’ preferences and buying history, Internet marketing enables you to personalize offers for them. You can make targeted offers that are a true reflection of their interests by tracking the product information and webpages that potential customers visit. Also, to help you increase the value of sales by consumers, you can get data for planning cross selling campaigns with the information available from tracking webpage visits. Internet marketing enables you to personalize offers to customers by building a profile of their purchasing history and preferences. By tracking the web pages and product information that prospects visit, you can make targeted offers that reflect their interests. The information available from tracking website visits also provides data for planning cross-selling campaigns so that you can increase the value of sales by customer.

• Online Marketing Helps You Take Advantage of Social Media: Social media is growing in importance every day. Internet marketing allows you to leverage this. The link between online revenue growth and social networking was highlighted in a recent study by the Harvard Business School’s Executive Education area. The study found that there were increased sales of about five percent generated by those consumers who reported that they were most strongly influenced by social networks. By incorporating social media tools in your Internet marketing campaigns, you can take advantage of this type of influence and watch your profits soar.

• Online Marketing Provides a Way to Really Build Relationships: When it comes to increasing client retention levels and building relationships with consumers, the Internet is a crucial platform. By sending a follow up email to thank the consumer and confirm a transaction, you can start the relationship out on the right foot when they make a purchase from your online store. You can help to maintain the relationship and provide a personal touch by emailing clients regularly with special offers that are customized for them. You can also help build a sense of community on your website by inviting these customers to submit product reviews for the items they bought. The Internet provides an important platform for building relationships with customers and increasing customer retention levels. When a customer has purchased a product from your online store, you can begin the relationship by sending a follow-up email to confirm the transaction and thank the customer. Emailing customers regularly with special, personalized offers helps to maintain the relationship. You can also invite customers to submit product reviews on your website, helping to build a sense of community.

• Online Marketing Allows You to Reach More People: You can overcome all barriers of distance by using marketing on the Internet. Without setting up local stores, you can sell products in any part of the nation, or even beyond. This widens your target market significantly. Plus, without opening a network of distributors in various countries, you can build an export company. To make certain your products and services comply with local business regulations and are suitable for the local markets, you should enlist the help of localization services if you plan on selling internationally or even in some remote locales nationally. Localization services include product modifications to reflect local market differences and translation services. With internet, online businesses, both medium and large-scale, are accessible to millions of online users. Your advertisement reaches global prospects through various online marketing strategies like email marketing, blog/content marketing, social media marketing, pay-per-click (PPC) advertisement. By marketing on the Internet, you can overcome barriers of distance. You can sell goods in any part of the country without setting up local outlets, widening your target market. You can also build an export business without opening a network of distributors in different countries. However, if you want to sell internationally, you should use localization services to ensure that your products are suitable for local markets and comply with local business regulations. Localization services include translation and product modification to reflect local market differences.

• Residual and Continuity Effect: One of the great benefits of online marketing is its inherent residual effects. Content marketing on websites and blogs remains functional and working to promote your products and services years after the marketing campaign to the content or products is over. E-book marketing produces long-term and viral effects after the production. For instance, If you run a campaign to improve traffic to your landing page, the residual power of such marketing remains effective years after the campaign might have been stopped.

• Online Marketing is Time-Effective: Internet marketing is fast and easy to start. You can set up a campaign at any time convenient for you. For instance, email marketing which is one of the best internet marketing strategies can be set up in a matter of hours. Within few minutes, you set up the auto-responder and start marketing even with a list of one subscriber.

• Automation versus Delegation: Another advantage of online marketing is the power of easy, one-mouse-click automation. In traditional offline business and marketing, marketers leverage the benefit of delegating best hands for various tasks while internet marketing has a better time-savvy opportunity. That is the opportunity to get every aspect of your business fully automated. You search for the best tool for your marketing campaign and all is done. You spend your time doing something else.

• Advertising to Target Markets: Internet marketing earns the advantages of ads targeting based on numerous factors such as gender, age, location, interest and hobbies. Advertising and marketing campaign could be targeted by filtering these demographic factors. Two or more factors can be combined to establish target market. Decision can be made to target advertising on female aged between 22-35 in the united state for a particular product or niche while elderly people can be targeted for another service. If you want to market a retirement saving program, you might target young people(who has long saving span) while retirement planning program might be more appropriate for older people who have worked close to the retirement age. Targeting can be very difficult in traditional advertisement like television, radio, magazine, newspaper if at all achievable. On the web, you can create interest-based targeting, behavioural-targeting PPC in Google and other PPC advertising networks.

• Diversification: Diversification is important in marketing and advertising your business to target audience. This means using many variants of tactics to reach prospects. Online marketing makes such diversification a lot easier. For example, if you want to run search engine advertising (SEA), social media advertising (SMA), it is easier to consider 2 angles:

1. Pay Per Click search engine or social media advertising
2. Outsourcing a SEO techie to optimize your business page for organic free traffic

For content marketing, you can run a business blog alongside your business website to create a marketing mix to enhance your marketing and advertising reach for your products and services. Similarly, you can integrate a mobile marketing strategies with your email marketing campaign. You might also consider creating ads of different format to target specific set of people and bring in much awareness. This kind of advertising and marketing diversification in online marketing eventually produces snowballing effect for the success of your online business.

• Easy, Low-Cost, Hurdle-Free Tracking: Online marketing affords you the opportunity to easily track every marketing campaign. Let take for instance, pay-per-click (PPC) search engine/content campaign you lunched, system tracking helps you know when the ads was clicked, who clicked it, from where it was clicked, how long the users stay on your business site, What did they buy, to where did they navigate and how they leave your site. To have a standard measure of the cause and effect, every marketing campaign you take has to be tracked. Otherwise it’ll be difficult to understand: Campaigns that are profitable and those that aren’t. Why some of the campaigns fail to yield expected result and what made others work better. The action steps you can take to optimize your campaign strategies to give better result and high return on investment (ROI). Your customers’ behaviours, their interests and experience. The right things you have done to do more of it.

However, before you get started with your e-marketing, it is very important to have some skills and know-how in order to run an e-campaign effectively. If not, you run the risk of wasting your valuable resources with a poor campaign. By developing an online marketing campaign to promote your product or service, you can significantly improve your consumer reach and cultivate a more personal relationship with potential customers at a far lower cost than you can with mass marketing. Online marketing provides a suite of powerful tools to help grow your firm’s reach and reputation – and ultimately, your firm itself. By fully leveraging the advantages of online marketing through tools such as content marketing, social media, email marketing, online video, and more, you can create a powerful lead-generating machine that puts your firm on the path to greater profitability and success.