What is Online Marketing?

 

What is Online Marketing? The term online marketing is a collective name for all marketing practices that take place online (on the internet). These are activities in which you share a message about your brand, product or services via online channels. This message is shared in an effective, measurable way with potential customers. In online marketing you can think of the use of e-mail, social media, advertisements in the search results and improving the natural find ability in Google, Bing, Yahoo and other popular search engines.

Online marketing is synonymous with internet marketing, digital marketing, web marketing, website marketing, e-marketing and growth hacking. Online marketing is often part of a growth hacking strategy, but it is actually more comprehensive. Read more about growth hacking here.

The counterpart of online marketing is offline marketing (traditional marketing). By this we mean marketing services without the use of digital media, such as the internet. Some examples are: advertisements in door-to-door papers, daily newspapers, magazines, television and radio advertisements, roadside billboards and promotional teams.

Types of online marketing

We just indicated that online marketing is a collective name for different types of digital marketing. We distinguish a separate marketing discipline for each digital channel. Each of these disciplines has its own advantages and disadvantages and contributes to strengthening your message to the customer. Depending on the target group that suits your product or service, you can opt for the following forms of marketing:

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing - also called referral marketing - is a form of online marketing where the person who promotes your products or services is rewarded for the converting traffic that he sends to your online store or company site. An affiliate uses a specially generated tracking code that, when clicked on by a potential customer, registers from which website the customer came. This form of marketing is extremely suitable for collaborations between companies and blogs or comparison sites. And it offers a great way to generate more sales. After all, you only pay a commission if there is a sale (conversion).

What is display advertising?

Display ads are banner ads that are displayed on someone else's website. As a result, you can generate a wide range. Display via Google Ads makes it possible to show your ad on more than 3 million websites. You can set this to reach a specific group that is super relevant to your product. Your advertisement will then be on websites where your target group is looking for information about your product. Usually display advertising works very well in the initial phase of the customer journey, when people are still gathering information and have not yet made a choice about which product they want to buy.

Has a visitor already visited your website, but has it not yet been converted into a paying customer? Then retargeting can be a powerful tool. With retargeting you target advertisements specifically at people who have already seen the website.

What isEmail Marketing?

In email marketing you come up with strategies that entice your target audience to subscribe to an Email list. For example, you can give away a free e-book in exchange for a registration. Consider, for example, a whitepaper download for which you have to leave your e-mail address. Once registered you can expose the people who have registered to an automatic mail sequence (auto responder). You set up these e-mails correctly once and then every new subscriber will receive automated e-mails.

What is search advertising?

In search advertising (SEA) we think of the paid search results in search engines. If you enter a search query in Google, you will usually first see ads and only below the natural (non-paid) search results. Google is the most widely used search engine, through Google Ads you can bet on paid advertisements. Search advertising is a very effective way to quickly get noticed by buying-oriented customers.

What is Social Media Marketing?

Many people are active on social media every day. It is therefore smart to use social media marketing to respond to social media channels such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn. The aim of most social media campaigns is to gain more exposure (branding), followers and fans for your brand.

What is Search Engine Optimization?

With search engine optimization or SEO (search engine optimization) for short, you do everything you can to set up your website in such a way that it is seen as relevant to certain searches in the eyes of Google and other search engines. Suppose you have a web shop in dog baskets, then you want people who search Google.nl for 'dog basket' to see your website first in the search results. With search engine optimization you make this possible.

This concerns three parts:

·         Technical optimization: Does the website load well and is it legible?

·         On-page optimization: Do you place content (text, video and images) that match the search?

·         Off-page optimization: Are there enough relevant links pointing to your website?

It is important that your website scores well in each of these three SEO focus areas. If you know how to achieve this, you will be ahead of the competition and will be easier to find than other websites in your industry.

Advantages of online marketing

·         Insight into the entire customer journey / sales funnel (everything is measurable);

·         Long-term more visible to your target group;

·         Better balance between costs and benefits of marketing;

·         More effective than traditional marketing.

What are the costs of online marketing?

We often get the question 'what are the costs of online marketing?'. This is a question that cannot be answered directly. It can be said that there are average costs for specific activities, but the exact costs for achieving your online marketing goals depend on your specific goals and the competition in the market. We would like to discuss the determination of these goals below.

What are online marketing goals?

Depending on the goals you pursue as an organization, you choose certain media in which to convey them. You formulate measurable conversion goals where the success or failure of the efforts can be tracked. We would like to explain below which goals you can have.

Lead Generation

Often an objective for a website where services are offered or products cannot be purchased directly on the site, but where contact is often sought first in the form of a request for quotation, contact form, e-mail or by telephone.

Conversions

Generate more sales. Leads can also be seen as conversion, as this could ultimately also lead to sales. It is important here that the right customers are approached in the right way. For example, a potential customer who is still orienting must be approached in a different way than a potential customer who already knows which product he / she wants, but not yet where.

Branding

Brand awareness is sometimes important in a market where there are many alternatives for your product. How can you ensure that consumers still come to your page? By increasing your brand awareness and reputation on the internet. With the help of a branding campaign you can ensure that you start to steal traffic and sales from your competitors because customers now choose you instead of your competitors.

Find Ability

Suppose your site is just new or renewed, your product or service is exactly what the consumer wants, but your website does not attract visitors and certainly does not generate any leads or sales. This is probably because your website is not found properly. If you search for the products you offer, you will only be on the fourth page in the search results. 70% of organic search traffic clicks on the top 3 organic search results and 90% of search traffic does not look beyond the first page. So your site could use some help to get to the first page.

Making marketing goals measurable

The best thing about online marketing is that it is possible to calculate anything. What the visitor is doing can be followed from traffic to conversion. By setting tracking goals within Google Analytics, you can monitor exactly how well visitor flows convert. This way you can quickly gain insight into which investments and efforts yield the best result.

If you find that the result is disappointing, you can choose to focus on other traffic or you should check whether you are creating the right expectations about your website. After all, a visitor who lands on a website where he cannot find what he is looking for is quickly gone. With an A / B test you can test whether a different layout of a page results in more success. 

What is an online marketing agency?

An online marketing agency uses the internet as a medium to bring your company to the attention of exactly the right target group. Based on an online marketing strategy, a campaign is conducted in a measurable, efficient manner that is only seen by people who are really interested in it.

There are digital marketing agencies that specialize in one specific form of online marketing. So you have countless companies that focus purely on SEA or SEO. In addition, there are full-service agencies that have one or more in-house specialists for every marketing discipline.

How do you determine whether an online marketing agency is good?

It is wise to check whether the online marketing agency can provide a correct answer to the following points:

·         Do they come up with a clear online marketing strategy (costs, activities and expected results)?

·         Do they have examples of campaigns successfully executed in the past?

·         Not unimportant! Do you click with the agency?

·         Reasons to hire an online marketing agency

·         Want to learn more about online marketing?

We hope you got an answer to the question 'what is online marketing?' We would like to have a no-obligation conversation with you to get to know you better. We distinguish ourselves by our versatility, among other things. We do the design of your website, but also the online marketing for your company. And if we go one step further, we also have the knowledge to offer you the E-business solutions that can be decisive in the complex maze of today's online world. From search engine optimization Rotterdam (SEO) to online advertising using Google Ads (SEA) you've come to the right place.

Frequently asked questions.

Why should I use online marketing for my website?

Exactly, for your website! You have a website or perhaps a web shop. If all is well one that you are incredibly proud of and which offers an even better service or product. And now just wait for your customers to come to your website.

You can still have such a beautiful website, but if you cannot be found you will not be found and it will be difficult to achieve your goals. In many ways, you can push traffic to your web page. Google Ads offers various options to ensure that your website is found well and if you use this well this ensures that exactly the people where you ... or rather, people who are looking for your product or service know your website easily. To find. This can be because they enter a search query in the Google search engine or because they see an advertisement of yours on a random website.