Internet marketing is the most inexpensive way to reach your target market, regardless of the size of your business.
But what is internet marketing, really?
Defining Internet Marketing
Also called online marketing, internet marketing is the process of promoting a business or brand and its products or services over the internet using tools that help drive traffic, leads, and sales.
Internet marketing a pretty broad term that encompasses a range of marketing tactics and strategies – including content, email, search, paid media, and more.
These days, though, internet marketing is often used interchangeably with “content marketing.”
Why?
Because content marketing is the internet marketing of the present and future.
Content Marketing Institute defines content marketing as:
“A strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”
Think of it like this: content marketing (or inbound marketing) is in direct opposition to traditional advertising (outbound marketing), and in direct integration with the patterns and habits of today’s generation.
Content Marketing vs. Traditional Advertising
Here’s the evolutional pathway behind the modernized form of marketing that is most successful today.
Selling no longer works (a.k.a., traditional advertising).
Why?
Traditional advertising focuses on pushing messages at the consumer to get them to buy.
It’s interruptive, obstructive, and intrusive.
It shouts, “Hey, look at me!” while waving its arms.
You may try to avoid eye contact, but traditional ads are persistent.
You know what traditional ads look like because you’re bombarded with them every single day.
Think TV commercials, billboards, magazine ads, radio ads, and web banner ads.
ds have been around for a long time, as evidenced by this traditional ad for “honest-to-goodness” coffee from the 1950s.
Ads may still work in some strategic places.
But Internet users can just click away from ads if they don’t want to see them.
Which is exactly what happens.
According to a PageFair report, 615 million devices in use today employ ad blockers. Additionally, ad blocker use increased by 30 percent in 2016 alone.
You know it, I know it, everybody knows it.
Ads are annoying.
And, they aren’t the way consumers prefer to learn about new products anymore.
Instead of businesses shoving themselves in consumers’ faces, they need to take a different, gentler approach.
Content marketing is exactly that.
Brands and marketers who use it publish content that teaches, inspires, guides, or solves a problem for their target audience.
With some handy tricks, the targets can find that content on the web without it being pushed at them.
If the prospects gain something useful from the content, they’ll keep coming back for more.
Finally, consumers can interact with the brand organically and share their content on social media.
Trust is forged.
Authority is established.
Connections happen.
These loyal followers can then be converted into leads and sales – naturally.
All of the above happens with a focus on giving value to the user.
Help users – offer them value and they’ll reward you in return.
That is what internet marketing/content marketing is all about at its core.
Why Internet Marketing?
Now that you know what internet marketing is, you still may be wondering why there’s so much hype around it.
Well, the hype is totally founded.
Internet marketing has shown proven success over and over again.
Here are some stats gathered from around the web to help give you an idea of why internet/content marketing stands tall:
- By 2019, content marketing is set to be an industry worth $313 billion.
- 91 percent of businesses already are convinced of its power and have already adopted it as an essential marketing tactic.
- Content marketing costs 62 percent less than traditional, outbound marketing, but pulls in 3x as many leads.
- If you’re a small business with a blog, you’ll rake in 126 percent more lead growth than your competitors without a blog
- If you have a blog and publish content, you’re likely to get 434 percent more indexed pages on Google, on average
From my own content marketing endeavors, I have seen my small business take off.
With 99 percent of our focus on content marketing, we managed to grow our worth to millions of dollars.
Getting Your Business Online
If you’re new to internet marketing and wish to get online as quickly and inexpensively as possible you can start with a social media platform like Facebook – you can create a business Facebook page in less than an hour. However, if you want more control over your online presence, a customized website is more appropriate. Ideally, you should have both a website and a social media presence, with each linking to the other
Five-Step Online Marketing Plan
STEP 1 – DEFINE YOUR CUSTOMER
Defining your customer is as important as choosing or creating your products or naming your business. If you have not yet done a marketing plan you need to do this exercise.
If you already have defined your ideal customer in your business plan, you can skip ahead to Step 2.
Action: Answer these questions as honestly as you can. In other words, don’t project your expectations or hopes on them. What is your perfect, solid customer really like?
- Is my perfect customer male or female?
- Does my perfect customer work out of the home or in the home?
- What is the job profile of my perfect customer – an executive, manager, worker, entrepreneur, stay-at-home parent, etc.
- What is the net household income of my perfect customer?
- What level of education does my perfect customer have?
- Does my perfect customer have room in their spending budget for my product/service on a one time, occasional or constant basis?
- How do my perfect customers use my product/service – do they buy it for themselves or as a gift?
- Does my perfect customer spend a lot, some or minimal time online?
- Where does my perfect customer look for my product/service? Both online and in physical locations?
Once you have answered all these questions, you should have a good picture of where to start looking to place your message and how to write your message copy.
STEP 2 – CHOOSE YOUR TARGETS
Now, where are you going to post your ads? A coordinated effort across several sites and venues commonly frequented by your customers is the most effective marketing campaign. If you are seen in several places your visibility and retained message are much stronger.
Complementary sites that you can help cross-promote to your visitors, who will then see you there too, will provide excellent reinforcement of your message. Holiday specific sites that are well promoted are excellent areas to consider.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising is another consideration for your marketing campaign. If you’re new to PPC, stick to places that allow you to set limits on daily expenditures. Google AdWords is a good example. This will also help you to experiment and determine the most effective keywords by paying close attention to the statistics of the PPC campaign.
Then there are the social media networks; all of the well-known ones offer their own advertising. See:
- Facebook Ad Basics
- Advertising on Instagram
- Pinterest Ads: A Simple Guide
- Get Started with Twitter Ads
When considering a website, social media network or newsletter for your ad, look at factors such as traffic, search engine placement, external linking (how many places link to it), quality of current ads and types of messages being presented in current ads.
- Are there many competitors of yours already advertising there?
- Is the advertising of a complementary nature to your business?
- Are the ads completely unrelated to your business and to the intended traffic of the site?
These are all clues to measure the best fit of your message to the traffic of the site.
MONITOR YOUR CONVERSION RATES
Conversion rates are an important measuring tool. What exactly do you want to measure to determine the success of your marketing campaign? Is it sales orders? Newsletter subscribers? Downloads of your free e-book?
A conversion rate is the number of click-throughs it takes to achieve your target measurement. So if your page has 1000 hits, 14 clicks and one sale in a day, your conversion rate is 1:14 or 7.1%. In other words, 7.1% of the clicks are generating a sale during this period.
Close monitoring of your conversion rates will quickly tell you what’s working and what is not. Don’t hesitate to tweak or modify your ads if needed. This is a process in constant motion until you find the best fit. Remember too, an ad may work superbly in one place but not in another.
Action: Create a spreadsheet or document listing all the sites and venues that are a consideration in your online marketing campaign.
STEP 3 – BUDGET
While some think this should be the first step, realistically you can better create the budget for your online marketing campaign when you have a good idea of the costs involved. That can only be done once you’ve figured out your targets.
You probably already have a figure in mind of how much you can really spend, so go back to your marketing campaign sheet and total the costs of all the ad spots you’d like to do. Chances are that total will exceed your overall spending limit.
Action: Now go through that list and prioritize the ads in terms of where you think you’ll get the most exposure and results that fit within your budget. Move the others into a holding list. Remember, as the ads start to pull in results you can always go back and expand your campaign from that holding list.
If you are engaged in pay-per-click advertising, check in daily for the first week or so and monitor your results to ensure you are paying for results.
Don’t forget to consider ad swaps and bartering as part of your payment and marketing budget. Many sites will swap newsletter ads or banner ads for similar placement on your site if you have one. (And if you don’t, why don’t you? Every small business needs a website.) It never hurts to ask.
STEP 4 – CREATING YOUR AD CONTENT
Online marketing works best when you focus only on one or two things. You may have a variety of products but pick one or two items that are good sellers and have a solid appeal to your target market for your marketing campaign.
Next ask yourself, “What am I selling”? It’s rarely the product or service. You are selling a benefit, something that registers at the emotional level. If you are selling fishing rods, for example, you’re selling the excitement of successfully landing that monster in the lake. If you are selling cosmetics, you’re selling beauty.
The most successful ads use words that relate to the customer. Use the words “you” and “yours” and never put the focus on “me”, “mine”, “our”, “my” or “we”. Create several emotional words associated with the product – fun, comforting, relaxing, stimulating, addictive – and use at least one of them in the ad.
Coupons are also an effective marketing tool. They can be easily tracked either manually or by an automated shopping cart system. Use different codes for different advertising locations and you’ll quickly see which ones get the best attention.
Action: Create a text ad for each item in your internet marketing campaign, making sure to hit at least one to three prime keywords in the text. Text ads typically run 60 characters wide by three, five, seven or 10 lines long.
Once you have your text ads, go through your banner inventory. Do you need to update them with a holiday-specific message? Does every image have an appropriate ALT tag? Is the graphic properly optimized for size (under 20-50kb) and resolution (72dpi)?
If you are creating ads for social media platforms, choose or create appropriate photos and make sure that each fits the requirements for the social media platform where it’s going to be placed.
STEP 5 – TRACKING AND MONITORING YOUR ADS
Tracking and reacting to your campaign’s successes is critical in maintaining an effective marketing campaign. From your website stats to PPC stats, there are many ways to determine what is working and what isn’t. By paying attention you’ll learn volumes about your ads and how to hone them for best results.
Tracking tricks include using specific coupon or sales codes for each ad placement, setting up separate entry pages on your site for each ad, and utilizing a service that helps track activity.
There are advertising management services that help you to track ad performance, such as Google’s DFP Small Business, a free service that is relatively easy to implement and gives powerful ad tracking management and support. Some venues, such as Facebook ads, provide their own reports.
Action: On a daily basis for the first two weeks, review the results of your various ads. Write them up in your tracking sheet and look for any trends or patterns. Which ones are performing, where and why? If some aren’t working, replace them with others that are or try another from your hold list.
Once you settle into a pattern of review and ad management you’ll know better how often you need to monitor your marketing efforts.
An Effective Marketing Campaign Doesn’t Have to Be Expensive or Difficult
Successful online marketing campaigns are within the reach of any business, no matter what your budget. By following the five basic steps above and committing to the follow-through, you can create a cost-effective campaign with a substantial return on investment.