Internet Marketing Techniques Explained

The world is being surrounded by internet. People generally have the intention of attaching everything of their daily life to internet. So the co-relation of the terms promotion and marketing is bound to happen.

What is Internet Marketing in a nut shell? 
Internet marketing, also referred to as web marketing, online marketing, or eMarketing, is the marketing of products or services over the Internet.

The real scope of internet marketing lies beyond the website building or operating through it. The strategies that relate to it include each and every aspect of online advertising services, products, and the websites that include the email marketing, market research, and direct sales.

Internet marketing follows a few important concepts. These are as follows:

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
This is a type of marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in Search Engine Result Pages. This is done through the use of paid inclusion, contextual advertising, and paid placement, and search engine optimization.

Blog Marketing
Blog marketing is internet marketing by way of web logs (blogs). Blogs are different than corporate websites because they contain daily or weekly postings, many times around a single subject. Many corporations use blogs to foster a dialog with customers so that they can explain the features of their products and services.

Email Marketing
This is a type of direct marketing that uses Email to communicate commercial or fundraising messages to an audience. Emails are sent with the purpose of:
• Strengthening the relationship of the business person with his/her previous and current clients to create customer loyalty
• Acquiring new clients or convincing existing clients to purchase something
• Adding advertisements sent by other businesses to their clients.

Viral Marketing
Viral marketing is a marketing technique that creates brand awareness by using social networks that already exist. Viral marketing increases brand awareness and achieves other marketing objectives (such as product sales) through self-replicating viral processes, analogous to the spread of pathologic and computer viruses. Information can be spread by word-of-mouth or it can be enhanced by the network effects of the internet. Viral promotions might be in the form of video clips, Ebooks, images, text messages, or brandable software.

Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is a term that describes the act of using social networks, online communities, blogs, wikis, and other collaborative internet forms of media for marketing, sales, public relations, and customer service. Common social media marketing tools include Twitter, blogs, LinkedIn, Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube.

Article Marketing
Article marketing is advertising in which businesses write short articles related to their industry. These articles are made available for publication and distribution in the marketplace. Each article contains a bio box and byline that include references and contact information for the author’s business. Well-written content articles released for free distribution have the potential of increasing the business’ credibility within its market as well as attracting new customers.

Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is an internet-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate’s marketing efforts.

Geo Marketing
Geo targeting (in internet marketing) and geo marketing are the methods of determining the geolocation (the physical location) of a website visitor with geolocation software and delivering customized content to that visitor based on his or her location, such as country, region/state, city, metro code/zip code, organization, Internet Protocol (IP) address, ISP, or other criteria.

There are pros and cons to the different types of internet marketing:

Advantages
Internet marketing can reach a wide audience for a small fraction of traditional advertising budgets.

Internet Marketing allows consumers to research and purchase products and services at their own convenience. Therefore, businesses have the advantage of appealing to consumers in a medium that can bring results quickly.

Most components of an Internet marketing campaign can be tracked, measured, and tested and thus marketers can determine what information interests the audience most.

Because efficiency, exposure, and response of internet media can be tracked much more easily than off-line media—through the use of web analytics, for instance—internet marketing can instill a more profound sense of accountability for advertisers.

Limitations
Internet marketing requires that customers use newer technologies instead of traditional media. Low-speed internet connections are another limitation. If companies build complex or large websites, people connected to the internet via dial-up connections or mobile devices experience serious delays in the delivery of the content.

From the customer’s perspective, the idea that the products or services that are being offered are virtual, can be a limitation. However, the liberal return policies and in-store pick up options do improve the situation for the customer.