Internet marketing, or online marketing, refers to advertising and marketing efforts that use the Web and email to drive direct sales via electronic commerce, in addition to sales leads from Web sites or emails. Internet marketing and online advertising efforts are typically used in conjunction with traditional types of advertising such as radio, television, newspapers and magazines. Internet marketing can also be broken down into more specialised areas such as Web marketing, email marketing and social media marketing:

Web marketing includes e-commerce Web sites, affiliate marketing Web sites, promotional or informative Web sites, online advertising on search engines, and organic search engine results via search engine optimization (SEO).

Email marketing involves both advertising and promotional marketing efforts via e-mail messages to current and prospective customers.

Social media marketing involves both advertising and marketing (including viral marketing) efforts via social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Digg.

An internet marketing strategy gives you a measurable and definitive way to target your market and position your business so that those looking for what you have to offer are finding you:

 “This makes internet marketing an indispensable modern way for corporate companies and individual business owners to improve their marketing reach, customer base, market share/sales volume and ultimately increase their profits”

GLOBAL REACH

It is important for business owners and marketers to maximise their client base by making their products and services accessible to millions of online users. Company advertisements can reach global prospects through various online marketing strategies like email marketing, blog/content marketing, social media marketing and pay-per-click (PPC) advertisement. By using marketing on the internet you can overcome all barrier of distance and sell products in any part of the nation, or even beyond. This widens your target market significantly and open up a whole new world of opportunities for your business.

COST EFFECTIVE

Internet marketing involved less or no start-up capital. You might start blog marketing, social media marketing, and email marketing with less investment compared to traditional marketing which greatly lies on the factors of production. These are not prerequisite to online marketing and translate to reduced cost of production, advertising and marketing since no money is incurred on staffing, procurement of business premises and middlemen. Offline traditional marketing like newspaper, radio, television and banners may cost thousands of pounds while fraction of such can run PPC advertising on Facebook, Google and other PPC companies.

Marketing product and services through a physical retail outlet is much more expensive than marketing them on the internet. The recurring costs of property maintenance and rental are not relevant to internet marketing.

TIME EFFECTIVE

Internet marketing is fast and easy to start and campaigns can be set up at your convenience, for example, email marketing which is one of the best internet marketing strategies can be set up in a matter of hours, within a few minutes and you can set up an auto-responder and start marketing even with a list of one subscriber.

Depending on the objectives and goals of your company, you will choose the type of internet marketing campaigns that best suit your specific needs and are within your budgetary limitations. It is imperative that you put your target market in focus when making this decision.

CONVENIENCE

Without having to worry about overtime payments to workers or opening hours. Internet marketing gives you the freedom to keep your enterprise open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Clients will also find it incredibly convenient to shop for your services or products on the internet on their own schedule. When it is convenient for them, they can browse your eCommerce store at any time of day and place orders.

SOCIAL MEDIA

Social media is growing in importance every day. Internet marketing allows you to leverage this. The link between online revenue growth and social networking was highlighted in a recent study by the Harvard Business School’s Executive Education area. The study found that there were increased sales of around five percent generated by those consumers who reported that they were most strongly influenced by social networks. By incorporating social media tools in your internet marketing campaigns, you can take advantage of this of influence and watch your profits soar.

STATISTICS

When you employ internet marketing strategies to promote your products and services, you can easily and economically measure statistics. This is because you get to interact with customers and get their views and opinions on your products and services immediately. Online marketing campaigns can be tracked and measured immediately and as such you are in a position to evaluate the effectiveness of the method you are using and implement changes where necessary.

On the internet everything can be measured, thus it’s easier for the companies to know almost instantly if their campaign is working or not, what company or user is interested in their products, from what cities or countries are they, etc.