Meaning of Online Marketing 

Online marketing is the method of using online channels to spread communication about a company’s brand, products, or services to its potential customers. The methods and terminologies used for online marketing include email, social media, display advertising, search engine optimization, Google AdWords, and more.

The purpose of marketing is to reach potential customers through the mediums where they spend their time reading, searching, shopping, and socializing online.

An increase in the adoption of the internet for business and personal use has created new channels for advertising and marketing activities, including those mentioned above.

There are also many benefits and challenges associated with online marketing, which uses primarily digital mediums to attract, engage, and convert potential clients into long-term customers.

How Online Marketing has evolved from Traditional Marketing

Before the emergence of online marketing channels, the cost to market products or services was comparatively expensive and a bit difficult to measure. For example, if some brand is doing promotion over radio or television then it is very difficult to calculate its reach. These methods are traditionally not well-suited to controlled tests and actual figures. In the modern world, anyone with an online business or offline business can participate in online marketing by creating a website and building customer-centric campaigns at a minimal cost. These modern marketing strategies have the capability to reach a wider audience and generate a high return on investment.

Benefits of Online Marketing 

A major advantage of using digital channels for marketing a business or product is the ability to measure the influence of any given channel, as well as how visitors obtained through different channels engage with a website or landing page experience. For the visitors who gets converted into paying customers a further analysis can be done to determine the channels which are very effective in acquiring more customers.

Analytics for online marketing through various channels can help in determining the following:

Which online marketing mediums are the most effective and efficient at acquiring customers, based on the conversion rate of potential visitors to customers, and the cost of acquiring those customers?

Which online marketing channels are effective at acquiring higher lifetime value for customers — such as email marketing, which helps in repeat purchases to prior customers?

Which group of customers possess strong engagement behavior and a high potential for sales of services such as software or mobile apps, which expect to sell more products to customers with high engagement.

People have a tendency to look for the search results on the first page only they do not tend to visit the second page. Getting your page ranked on the first page is basically called SEO.

Thus, SEO is very important when it comes to online marketing because it gives you organic traffic which helps in creating your brand identity and customer acquisition. Good SEO will help you in increasing your Return on investment at a faster rate.

There are 2 types of SEO’s

1. On-page SEO: It looks at what your site or page is about.
2. Off-page SEO: It looks at how popular or authoritative is your site. (https://medium.com/@CarolForden/on-page-vs-off-page-seo-what-is-the-difference-b1d1e910806e )

2) Search Engine Marketing: SEM and online marketing are like car and petrol as they both go hand in hand. Like, SEO is very important to increase organic traffic. SEM is important to increase traffic through paid campaigns to achieve quick results. It is involved in creating google ads in your domain.

SEM involves numerous options like search ads, display ads, shopping campaign, video campaign and app campaign. These options are useful to spend some money so as to increase traffic quickly. Also, it is useful for implementing some campaign and see how well they perform through analytics.

SEM has provided a platform for online marketing which is more focused towards the audience one wishes to target. They can choose the location where ads will be displayed, language of user, interests and choose their budgets. They can even schedule when they want to run their ads.

With SEM, many businesses have been able to get quality traffic on their website which ultimately helps in increasing their sales and do real-time tracking. Google ads has provided a lot of bidding options to online marketers. They can take help of Google and place their smart bids to effectively utilize their money on ads.

Though SEM is a time-consuming process in online marketing but it helps in achieving quick success.

3) Email Marketing: Email Marketing is the most traditional and important part of online marketing; many people believe that email marketing is of no use as it is out of date but it is not true.

Email marketing is majorly used for retargeting and mostly in B2C but if it is done correctly then Email marketing can be very efficient for B2B also.

Email marketing can help in creating a brand image and awareness among consumers. It can also help in generating new clients if email marketing is done with proper research and domain knowledge.

4) Social Media: It is impossible to talk about the pillars of online marketing without giving the proper credit to the popularity of social media and how it is important for businesses to gain brand identity, recognition, loyalty, and generation of higher revenue.

Social media has all together generated a new way of doing business not only online but in general. In the modern world, it’s very difficult to find a business without any social presence and if they do find the odd one, it’s better to assume they are not achieving the results they are looking for and they are missing lots of benefits that online presence provides to any business as social media is all about building effective relationships with your target audience with viral content that creates engagement on your post and videos.

5) Affiliate Marketing: Affiliate marketing is the process of networking with people (i.e connections) to promote your products for you and in turn, they get a commission on every sale they make.

Affiliate marketing helps in creating a long-lasting image of a product as many people get associated with a particular brand which thus leads to a higher number of sales and better brand presence.

You may not like affiliate marketing but you can’t discredit the power of affiliates and affiliate marketing when it comes to online marketing as they are a huge driving force behind online businesses and a lot can be done with this mode if implemented properly after thorough research.

6) Content Marketing: Content marketing can be portrayed as publishing content for marketing purposes but it has much deeper importance than just publishing.

There are numerous ways through which one can publish content and it goes way beyond a simple blog post about a niche. Think from a larger perspective and see all the mediums and platforms that are available to us.

For instance, the video makes for great content and if you’ve been paying attention to the latest online marketing trends, video is generating more and more important as it helps in creating a larger impact.

Today there are many sites such as Slide Share, Instagram, Medium, Hub Spot, and others that can help you push content out to be used to build up your digital marketing presence.

Though it takes time to write content online marketing has evolved over time. Brands that create quality content will stay in the competition and will be able to achieve growth.

7) Analytics: The advantage that analytics provides while doing online marketing and running several campaigns is that you get insights about your business which helps in determining the conversion rate and reach. Through this, it becomes easy to calculate ROI.

Analytics is important as it helps you in analyzing your audience, their buying behavior which helps you to formulate better ad campaigns. It tells you which strategy is actually working and what should be implemented to further increase sales.

It is impossible to find out the success or failure of any ad campaign without data, facts, and figures. Thus, analytics is very important for making decisions that impact most businesses. Businesses must evaluate and make reports of each and every platform on which they are running an ad campaign or doing marketing.

Conclusion 

These are the 7 pillars that are the backbone of online marketing and if these pillars are considered seriously and proper research is carried out then they can be a great boon for any business, otherwise, they can even destroy the business if not implemented properly.