Internet Marketing is the act of marketing a product or service through the Internet. It utilizes the Internet as the medium to communicate a product or service to potential customers.
You’ll find most Internet marketers will tell you it’s the act of getting more people to your website and then taking an action like purchasing a product or filling a form where they will go through the sales cycle.
I can tell you it goes much more beyond that. Internet marketing includes:
1. Research
First, you need to research the customers and the market before jumping in. Activities include:
- Identify target markets or customers
- Identify customer’s online behaviour
- Identify competitor websites
2. Getting customers to your website or other online property
This is the meat-and-potatoes of Internet marketing. You need to get potential customers to your online property by generating online campaigns to direct customer’s actions to your product or service. To accomplish this, we need to incorporate activities which you’ve probably heard before. They include:
- Search engine marketing
- Search engine optimization
- Email marketing
- Social media marketing
- Affiliate marketing
- Pay-per-click marketing
- Web analytics (and reporting)
- Inbound marketing
Keep in mind that not all tactics listed above can or should be implemented in all Internet marketing plans. Depending on your product or service, you may only incorporate a handful of them.
3. The customer’s final action
Once the customer has followed your campaign (typically getting them to go to your website), you need to create a compelling offer and call-to-action for the customer to take, whether it’s a direct purchase or filling a form (for sales follow up).
Having effective analytics and reporting for website traffic is essential to understand patterns in customer behaviour leading up to the sale. Continuous improvements to the process is needed to improve sales. Improvements such as:
- Editing content to make it more compelling
- Changing click-flow to the final offer
- Changing how the sale takes place, or how leads are captured
