We are all used to relying on the conventional forms of marketing for our business. Every company wants their business on a billboard or a flag pole (perhaps sourced via Flagpoles, Etc), waving their company at consumers until they can’t avoid it anymore. But times change and there always comes a need for change.
Today, almost every company has chosen to use this form of marketing to communicate with potential customers. Online marketing refers to all the marketing activities undertaken online by an enterprise. Now, if you click on almost anything on the internet, you will find an advertisement attached to it. This is also a form of online marketing. This phenomenon has become a huge hit on social media websites and also on search engines like Google, Bing, and more. Such advertising done on search engine websites is called search engine marketing or SEM. So here are some important online marketing tools that can be very useful for your firm.
Online Advertising
The power of online advertising is inevitable. This is simply because of the high number users it has and the obvious benefit of reaching out to the masses easily. Every business benefits from online marketing, whether that’s a sales team or even online marketing for attorneys. The internet is a great place to promote your business, whatever it might be. When you search something on Google, the first few links that you view are almost always paid advertisements. Now imagine the number of people that may view these ads when they search such related data. More than 3.5 billion searches are made each day on Google. The sheer power of this mode of advertising makes it one of the most sought after and reliable sources of marketing.
Social Networking Sites
Social Media websites like Facebook have also become popular platforms for advertising. The beauty of these mediums is that the advertiser can customise the advertisement based on who and how many can view them. On Facebook, which has about 700 million active users each day, the advertiser can choose age, gender, marital status, etc., based on his target customer and then posts the ad. Similarly on Google, the advertiser can choose what type of searches should prompt the ad to ensure an exact reach to the desired public. Many Indian eCommerce companies (Flipkart, Snapdeal, Amazon, Homeshop18, etc…) and their discount coupon provider companies like coupondunia, GrabOn, groupon are using different social media platforms to promote their products and services directly on such platforms to reach to their potential customers.
Target Marketing and Investment
This feature is extremely unique to online marketing. It helps save the unnecessary effort of firms to go through to find their target market and is also cost effective as you would be marketing only to the required people. The websites that post the ad are paid on a time basis or in the case of Google, are paid based on the number of people that have viewed or used the ad. This reduces cost as the number of viewers of the ad can be controlled.
Online advertising has also been one of the most primary sources of income for today’s social networking websites. Due to their effectiveness and reach, these ads a hefty lot to the advertiser. This is what makes this concept a great type of advertising for any brand.