In today's online era, online marketing seems to be far more profitable than traditional marketing. Moreover, almost everyone must use the internet every day.
Not surprisingly, many businesses are starting to switch to online marketing strategies. In fact, 3.79 million MSMEs have gone online, you know. If you still only advertise in newspapers, you might lose out to your competitors.
So, before starting to carry out online marketing, you should first look at the explanation of the meaning of online marketing, its benefits and types in this article. Ready? Let's start the explanation!
What is Online Marketing?
Online marketing is an effort to promote products using an online platform that can be accessed via the internet. For example through social media, websites, blogs, online advertisements, and the like.
Considering that global internet users have reached more than 4 billion people, many businesses have started to choose to use online marketing in droves. Evidently, the amount of budget spent on online advertising always goes up every year.
Admittedly, online marketing does have better benefits for your business. Be it small business or big business. What are the advantages and benefits of online marketing? Read on for the explanation in the next chapter.
What are benefits of online marketing?
Here are some of the benefits of using online marketing for your business.
1. Reach More Consumers
As mentioned above, there are billions of people in the world who actively use the internet every day. In Indonesia alone there are more than 200 million people who use the internet.
What's more, 70% of people prefer to use the internet to research products rather than through traditional advertising. That means, you have the opportunity to reach millions of people with online marketing.
Compare if you still use brochures that are distributed or posted only in certain locations. You may only be able to reach certain areas.
2. Target a More Specific Audience
Another advantage of online marketing is that you can set ads to only appear to your target audience. For example, you have a women's clothing business. Then, you can set your ads to show only to female audiences.
In fact, at a certain age and location. Also, you can also choose which ads will appear on any device, both on desktop and mobile devices.
You may not necessarily get these benefits in traditional marketing. For example, you advertise on banners or billboards. It's not certain that your target audience will see the banners you put up.
3. Easy to Measure Performance
Online marketing also helps you measure performance more easily. For example, when you place an ad on the Google Ads platform, you will get an ad performance report. Such as the number of people who saw the ad, clicked a certain button, to the number of people who bought the product from the ad.
With clear performance metrics, you can find out whether your marketing is successful or not. Also, you can find out if you need to make improvements in certain parts, for example adding a budget, changing designs, and so on.
4. The costs incurred are relatively more affordable
Just like traditional marketing, running online marketing also costs money. However, the cost is more affordable and easy to return on investment. Because, direct ads seen by target consumers.
Apart from Ads, there are also some online marketing that can be used as investments for long-term promotions. For example, by implementing an online marketing strategy through blogs or SEO. With this step, you can still reach your audience stably every month for years.
What is online marketing strategy?
Digital marketing has many ways according to products, services and target consumers. Some of the online marketing strategies are as follows.
1. Do Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
The first online marketing strategy is SEO or Search Engine Optimization. The purpose of SEO as an online marketing tool is for your website to appear on the first page of Google. However, this is done without the use of advertising through Google Ads, so the key to success lies in the content presented on the company's website.
Currently, SEO is divided into two, namely as follows:
- On-page SEO: SEO optimization within the website itself. This is done through creating SEO friendly content.
- Off-page SEO: SEO optimization that comes from outside the website, namely through adding backlinks.
- Technical SEO: Technical website optimization so that it is easy to rank by Google
2. Do Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Well, if SEO was an effort to get visitors on search pages organically. You can also get potential buyers by advertising your website on Google. This step is also called a Search Engine Marketing (SEM) strategy.
To carry out a search engine marketing strategy, you need to use paid advertising services such as Google Ads. The results obtained from SEM are somewhat faster than running SEO. Because, with a certain amount of money, the website can appear on the first page of Google.
3. Pay Per Click (PPC)
Pay Per Click or PPC is product marketing using paid advertising, where later you will pay for promotional services according to the number of clicks made by consumers. The advantages of using Pay Per Click as a marketing strategy are as follows:
- Controlling the budget spent on advertising.
- Set consumer targets.
- Free to choose the platform where to display ads according to business needs.
- Set the ad display duration.
4. Content Marketing
One of the most common strategies carried out in online marketing media is through content marketing. You can create articles, infographics, e-magazine, or videos to upload on websites and social media.
5. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a promotional strategy by giving commissions to partners who successfully sell products through certain links. This strategy is much more economical, because the promotion is carried out by your partner or affiliate. So you don't need to spend a budget on advertising.
Also, you can set the commission you give yourself. It can be a percentage of the sales price or a flat commission. Many businesses have implemented this marketing strategy, you know
Furthermore, the strategy for doing online marketing is to work with other entrepreneurs to market their products and share the profits. This not only has the opportunity to increase sales, but also expand your business relations so that it is increasingly known by many people.
6. Influencer Marketing
Another example of online marketing that you can try is using influencer marketing. In simple terms, influencer marketing is promoting products through influencers.
This influencer marketing strategy has been widely used by business owners because of the satisfying results. In fact, 89% of marketers admit that ROI (Return On Investment) from influencer marketing is better than other marketing channels.
So, if you want to use influencers for product promotion, make sure to choose influencers that are in accordance with the target consumer.
What are the main types of online marketing?
After knowing the strategies for marketing products, also get to know the types of online marketing that you can choose from. Some of them are as follows.
1. Website
One of the online marketing media is the website. Not only easy to use, websites are also more effective than social media and email because they have the possibility to continue to grow in the long term. So, you only need to write interesting articles, add information about products, promotions, contacts, and make sure the content is SEO friendly.
2. Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
An example of online marketing is using SEM, namely advertising a company's website so that it occupies the first page in Google search. Of course this service is paid because you have to use advertisements.
But the results are fairly fast because product advertisements will always appear on the first page when consumers are looking for that type of product.
3. Online Advertising
Online advertising is a type of marketing by utilizing advertisements to be displayed on websites, YouTube or social media. An example is by subscribing to Google Ads.
4. Email Marketing
For those of you who already have a fairly broad customer base, be sure to always communicate with them through discount offers, promos, the latest products, and other strategies via email marketing. This action is quite effective to maintain consumer loyalty.
5. Social Media Marketing
The trend of using Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, and Twitter has increased in recent years, making online marketing something that can be done easily through social media. All you have to do is make interesting posts and copy or use endorsement services to market your product.
In addition, the way to increase the effectiveness of social media performance as an online marketing venue is to conduct surveys of products or services that are popular with the public through the polling feature. This can help you increase production effectiveness.
Conclusion
Now, you understand more about the meaning of online marketing, benefits, examples, and strategies, right? There are lots of online marketing strategies that you can use according to your business needs.
If you want to try to increase brand awareness and sales, you can use SEO, SEM, PPC, affiliate marketing, influencer, and email marketing strategies.
If you want to improve communication and engagement with potential customers, try social media marketing and email marketing strategies.