Internet marketing has become not only an extremely useful tactic for spreading awareness about your business and your brand, but it’s also become necessary for the success of your company.
What is Internet Marketing?
Internet marketing is a generic term for all marketing that occurs online or digitally. It often consists of a wide variety of strategies that help brand, promote, and strengthen a business.
These different forms of internet marketing can be useful in many ways and you’re probably involved in a few of them unknowingly such as social media marketing, content marketing, and influencer marketing.
While traditional marketing such as television, radio, and print advertising is still a decent way to market, many people who hear about a product, deal, or service through these means go online to research the legitimacy of the company. If you don’t have an online presence these days, there’s a chance your company will go down with the times.
6 types of internet marketing
These are 6 types of internet marketing that work hand in hand to create a powerful marketing strategy that will give you a successful online presence. You already know that it’s important to have a presence online, now read on to see how you can make that happen!
Social media marketing
Social media marketing is the use of social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or Pinterest to gain recognition, sales, and a following. Social platforms are a great way to start creating a brand and positioning your company as a figure within a certain niche.
The best way to do this is to continuously engage with your followers. Answer any questions they have as quickly as you can to establish your brand as one with excellent customer service skills and caring towards their following.
It can be as simply as retweeting when someone mentions your page like Keap did below!
You can also humanize your company by taking a stand for something you believe in, show that your employees are real people, and expose your followers to the positive environment within your company.
Customers like to see a company with a personality. That’s why we post fun videos and pictures of our staff!
These tactics are important to establishing yourself as an authority in different industries. If your company doesn’t have some sort of life to it, then it isn’t relatable or intriguing to potential clients.
This is called organic social media marketing. As you build a community and create relationships with your clients or consumers, it generates customer loyalty.
There is a way to pay your way to popularity on social media and that’s through ad services such as PPC on Facebook, Instagram, and recently popular avenues like TikTok. More on that later.
There are many times when running a social media page can become overwhelming. When you start getting big and developing a large following, there will be plenty of comments, inquiries, and direct messages that you’ll need to reply to. On top of the need for content creation, it’s extremely important not to leave any of your dedicated followers hanging. Most companies will hire a social media specialist or toss it off to someone in their marketing department who may not know how to promote your brand properly.
Hiring a marketing firm that specializes in social media marketing and other forms of internet marketing can actually be more affordable than hiring someone on full time because it’s often just a monthly payment for an array of different strategies and social implementations.
You can also use automation to answer low-priority questions that are frequently asked. That leaves room for your social media specialist or hired marketing agency to handle high priority cases that need a human touch.
Affiliate marketing
AKA online referral marketing, this tactic allows a business to develop a program where they pay a commission to any website, social media page, or individual in exchange for an opportunity to drive their influencer traffic to their company’s site via an affiliate link.
You’ve probably seen someone on the internet say the line “Click the link below for a 20% off discount of the products features in this video!” or seen something along those lines written beneath a blog post or article. Whenever you click on that link or use a promo code from someone on social media or a niche site, they’re likely getting a small cut of the profit from your purchase.
So how does this benefit you?
Using influencers whose page aligns with your business model does two things.
- It brings in traffic from the influencer’s audience
- The influencer acts as a sales rep
They market your product, mention it as often as they can, while also pushing sales. Why? Because the more sales they put through, the more commission they receive. Just like a sales rep. And guess what, having links on pages or accounts with high authority increases SEO! All these benefits for a small fraction of what you earn.
Email marketing
Email marketing is the use of email to send out direct marketing messages to a certain audience to capture new customers and maintain the loyalty of existing ones.
Although it’s not the most interesting marketing tactic, it is one of the strongest forms of internet marketing right now. It has an average return on investment of 122% which is higher than most other types of internet marketing listed here. There are so many benefits to using email marketing such as:
It’s also a very active avenue. Most people have their emails synced to their phones which means your email can reach its audience within a matter of seconds.
Here’s the catch. For email marketing to work, you need to get email addresses. To do this, marketers often use email marketing in conjunction with other types of marketing that allow a platform for subscription forms. Once someone subscribes, you get access to their email address and start sending!
If you email your customers quality content that they want to see like sales, new products, blog posts, discounts, and useful information then your unsubscribe rate will go down and your return on investment will increase.
Content marketing
Content marketing is a strategy used in digital marketing where a marketer consistently creates and promotes online materials that are relevant to the business’ niche. The purpose of this content is to attract, engage, and potentially convert these visitors into customers.
A few different forms of content are:
- Blogs
- Videos
- Niche reports
- Infographics
- Podcasts
- Emails
- Photos
If you’re skeptical about whether or not this marketing actually works, just remember that it brought you here! This article is a form of content marketing and it brings in visitors to the Swiggle Media site who are searching for the information that we’re providing via these articles.
Bringing in visitors not only increases the SEO of your site, it also gives you a chance to convert them into sales or clients.
Search engine optimization (SEO)
Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is the practice of optimizing your website and any content to improve your ranking on search engines. The higher up in the search engine your web pages are, the more visitors you’ll get over the competition.
For example, let’s say you own a website that sells marketing services like this one. Your goal is to get your webpage on social media marketing to rank in the top 10 searches whenever someone searches “Best social media marketing company”. SEO is what makes this happen.
If you want to know more about SEO marketing and how it can help your website grow, along with your business, we wrote an entire blog about it! Check it out!
Paid advertising
Paid advertising is a very effective form of advertising that shows internet users advertisements on search engines and other online platforms such as social media sites, blogs, shopping sites, and more.
When people think about types of paid advertising in internet marketing, they tend to think about PPC, pay-per-click advertising where you pay a fee each time a user clicks on one of your ads. While this may be the most popular form of paid advertising, it isn’t the only one.
There’s CPM which is cost-per-mile; a form of paid advertising that charged advertisers per 1,000 impressions. Impressions are simply views of your advert, not clicks. If it shows up on someone’s screen, that’s one impression.
If your advertisements are videos rather than an image, you’d typically be paying a CPV or cost-per-view. This is fairly self-explanatory.
Another one that isn’t as common is CPA or cost-per-action/acquisition. This means that every time an internet user takes a specified action, i.e. makes a purchase or downloads a file etc., you’ll pay a fee.
The most popular types of paid advertisements are on Google and Facebook because they are the two biggest digital advertising platforms and have huge market shares in the category of search engine and social media respectively.
Which do I choose?
It can be hard to choose the type of internet marketing you’re going to focus on because so many of them play into one another. Some of them can be very affordable if you do it yourself yet take up a lot of your time. Others have quick results but cost a lot of money if you don’t know how to pace and target your adverts correctly.
The best thing to do is to try them all, see what works for your business and continue focusing on that. It’s best to get advice from an internet marketing specialist to make sure you’re doing everything correctly and marketing on the right platforms for your niche!
