Internet Marketing - Overview

Internet Marketing and Website Promotion include all activities to promote your website in order to achieve your goals. Many of these activities include payments to third party providers, such as Pay-Per-Click adverts on Search Engines and Directories; Affiliate Marketing to have other people recommend your website and business; or Web Campaigns which are often a mix of electronic adverts, newsletter adverts and ePR on highly frequented websites in your business arena.

Many of these activities include payments to third party providers, such as Pay-Per-Click adverts on Search Engines and Directories; Affiliate Marketing to have other people recommend your website and business; or Web Campaigns which are often a mix of electronic adverts, newsletter adverts and ePR on highly frequented websites in your business arena.

A section that we treat separately, is the new trend of using Social Networking sites to get your message to the marketplace. These sites, also named Web 2.0 technologies, have their users interacting with each other. This, in turn, increases traffic and promotes word-to-mouth Marketing - also called Business Referral Networking or simply Business Networking.

Internet Marketing offers various possibilities to involve your prospects, to interact with them, to teach them about your products and services. In many cases it helps to teach them about your core competency first - and in the second step about what you have to offer. Here is a couple of choices what you can do:

• Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising works like this: you open an account with the search engine or directory of your choice.  Then you choose the keywords which you would like to be on top of the list for. Depending on how much offer and demand there is for the relevant keyword, prices may vary a lot from term to term. Also, the higher you would like to be ranked, the higher the price will be. This process is called bidding - for a certain place on the list of advertised search results. You pay for each click of an internet user on your advert.
  

• Affiliate Marketing means that other people recommend your website and business. You would offer other website owners to recommend your products and services and to refer their visitors to your website. You would pay them a commission if the referred visitor actually buys from you. This choice has the lowest risk if you only pay your affiliates when you are making a sale yourself: Web Marketing without fixed costs.
  

• Viral Marketing usually means to spread your message like a virus on your target marketplace. Typical means to do that are Social Networking sites and Discussion Forums. You can answer other user's questions or raise questions yourself, putting a link to your website or your email address underneath. On Social Networking sites you can contact other members directly on the site, recommend other members to them, ask and answer questions and learn from the marketplace. There are Social Networking sites for personal use and others for business use, the limits between them increasingly blurring. In small marketplaces where website members also learn to know each other personally, this can also have a great word-to-mouth effect.
  

Internet Marketing should deliver tangible results - to support you to achieve your goals. And your goals, in turn, determine your Marketing Process and how your Internet Marketing programme should look like. Here are some examples:

• If your goal is Brand Awareness, Internet Marketing can deliver your core message associated with your brand into the market. You can raise the number of unique visitors on your website and the time they spend on it, so your message will be read by more people and they will increasingly remember it. You can use Social Networking sites to spread the word. Further, you take similar action as outlined in the next section.

• If your goal is Lead Generation to feed your Sales Team, Internet Marketing should enable you to raise your prospects' attention and then to involve them in a learning process about your offering. The key here is to put the prospect in control of the process, not you. The prospect will decide when the time is right to talk about a purchase. But then, Internet Marketing allows you to involve the prospect increasingly and to raise his or her interest step by step. And you can mix it with your other Marketing activities, such as Telemarketing, Mailing Campaigns, Event Marketing, Advertising, Reseller/Dealer Marketing, Analyst Relations and the like. The more sophisticated your Lead Generation via Internet Marketing, the more of the following eCommerce section may apply to your business.
  

• If your goal is to sell via the Internet and you run an E-Commerce business, Internet Marketing is at the heart of your business. Thus, your website design must allow self-service for your clients and eShop technology. Further, all your business processes and relating technology are driven by Internet Marketing and usually run electronically. This, in turn, requires much more process and programming work beyond the mere website design: automated billing and other back office processes; interfaces from your website to your internal IT systems; possibly dedicated data bases "behind" your web front end.

Whatever your goals may be, there is a wealth of activities that Internet Marketing has to offer to promote your website and your business. To make things as simple as possible, we cluster them into the following sections which overlap in some respect:

• Search Engine Optimisation (SEO): Simply said, this means having your website on top of the organic search results on the search engines such as Google, Yahoo but also industry specific and special interest search engines. More...

• E-Mail Marketing: E-Mail has increasingly become the medium to interact with prospects and involve them into the business topic of choice. Prospects may allow organisations on their websites and other Marketing material to send them electronic information (so-called Opt-In). More...

Can we help? Get in touch now for a free telephone consultation: info@jmoellerconsulting.com or +44 (7811) 353 996