Professions related to digital are becoming more and more in demand. It is already virtually impossible to imagine modern life without search engines, social networks, online ordering of cabs, food, airline tickets, and other things. Entire corporations are working to make people’s lives easier and more convenient with the help of the Internet and its possibilities.
If you want to find yourself in digital, look into internet marketing.
Broadly speaking, internet marketing is the promotion of goods and services online. As a rule, its ultimate goal is to sell a product/service or to increase the recognition of the company.
Its main difference from the classical marketing – the possibility of using web analytics to track the entire path of the user: from the first interaction to the sale of a product or service. In addition online marketing allows you to specifically target each individual user (eg by running ads on TV, we broadcast it to a fairly wide audience, and showing a banner or video on YouTube, we can target certain people who are most likely to become our customers).
Internet marketing consists of:
- Paid advertising (contextual, targeting, media),
- SMM (social media marketing),
- SEO-promotion,
- email marketing,
- web analytics,
- content marketing.
Below we will briefly talk about all the components of Internet marketing.
Paid advertising
Everyone who has anything to do with business has repeatedly heard of contextual and targeting advertising. First of all, such advertising is used to introduce the audience to your product and the subsequent sale.
The general mechanism is this:
- Many systems have advertising platforms – places where they sell advertising (for example, search strings in the output or posts within the social networks). And also, these sites have information about users (their actions, interests, search queries), based on which you can target them.
- You place ads through advertising systems and show ads only to users who are more likely to be interested in your product or service. You independently choose which users you will target (based on the opportunities that the advertising system gives you).
- Potential client goes to the site and if your proposal interested him, makes a targeted action (leaves contact information, register, etc.).
- With web analytics, you record visits and targeted actions on the site, and understand how much you pay for each customer you attracted.
- Because of the great competition your advertising may not pay off, then it’s worth optimizing it. Based on your analytics, you can determine which targeting and keywords bring conversions at the price you want – you should keep them. The rest need to be turned off, or to think about what you should change in them to make them work for you.
Based on targeting and placements, paid advertising can be divided into:
- Contextual advertising. The basis of targeting – search queries that the user entered in the search engines (for example, the user entered the query “teddy bear to buy,” and we at this request shows ads with a link to our online store, which sells teddy bears).
- Targeted advertising. We target users based on their interests and activity within a social network (e.g. if a user is subscribed to a pottery community, we show them ads for pottery classes).
- Media advertising. It is at the intersection of classic and online advertising, shown to a wide range of users in order to get the maximum coverage.
Retargeting can be singled out separately. With the help of this tool, you can re-show ads to people who have already seen your offer, but did not make a conversion. It works quite simply:
- The potential client enters the site.
- A pixel or analytics tag captures his visit and actions.
- Based on the collected data, you can create audiences of users by different criteria. For example, an audience of those who viewed the content of the page to the end, showed interest, but for some reason did not perform the target action.
Social Media Marketing (SMM)
Social media pages are the face of your company. Many people, before buying a product or ordering a service, look for reviews and photos on social networks to form a more complete impression of the brand. A company’s active presence on social media builds trust, and if you publish content that is interesting and useful to your target audience, you build a community of loyal customers around you.
A company’s social media page can help solve several problems:
- Communication with your target audience.
- Increasing brand awareness.
- Forming a community of loyal customers.
- Sale of goods and services.
Depending on the tasks you want to solve, the SMM-promotion strategy will be built differently.
General guidelines for social networking
- Choose the social networks that your audience prefers and create pages for your company.
- Make a content plan based on the goals you want to achieve. If your goal is to build a community around your brand, prepare useful and educational content, as well as newsworthy content that provokes discussion. In general, when preparing content, ask yourself more often: “How can a community post be useful to subscribers?”
When you openly share knowledge, your credibility as an expert is automatically increased, and clients see no barriers to reaching out to you for help. This principle works well on social networks because audiences are eager to share useful content, and smart feeds appreciate such posts and start ranking your posts among relevant audiences, and not just among community subscribers. - Remember that social media sales are not always direct sales. Especially if your business has a long buying decision cycle. Social networks can play a role at different stages of the sales funnel: at the first touch, to introduce the brand and product features, show your expertise and build trust; at later stages, to prepare for a purchase and help make a decision in favor of your brand.
- Monitor how your audience reacts to your publications and analyze metrics: the reach of your publications, likes, reposts, number and quality of comments, conversions and conversions by utm tags. This will help you understand which content is of interest to your audience and which is not working or has stopped working.
- You can develop your community with the help of targeted advertising and publications in other communities. Without advertising it is almost impossible to build up the audience of a commercial community nowadays, so targeting and visiting other thematic publishers is a necessary regular process for attracting new subscribers.
- Keep an eye on trends and new tools on social media. What challenges are now being launched, what memes are popular, what new masks have appeared in stories. Use these trends for your communications if you are sure it will be appropriate.
- Run contests. Social media engagement is as much about posting content as it is about interacting with followers. Contests can help stimulate activity on your page, increase customer loyalty, and even solve some of your marketing goals (such as collecting leads or a base for retargeting). Decide what results you expect from a contest, and choose one of a dozen mechanics: from reposting contests to large-scale gamification.
- Watch what others are doing and try to stand out from them. It’s not just about your competitors, look at what content is coming out in other popular publishers, what your audience is responding to, and what formats are popular right now. Remember that there are thousands of other Influencers competing for your audience’s attention, so you really need to make an effort to win in this fight.
SEO
It’s not enough to create a beautiful website, fill it with products, connect the payment and delivery services. You also need to make sure that your customers can find it. This is the main task of SEO – to make sure that people who are looking for your products or services on the Internet, find them.
Sounds good, but in reality it’s not that simple. In order to collect a lot of organic traffic, you need to work hard, but first we have to understand the nuances of search engine optimization. This article will not give a comprehensive guide on SEO, but it will tell you about the main stages of work on the site and point out what you should pay special attention to.
Do not forget that an additional signal that your site is worthy of high positions, for search engines are links to it from other sites. The more solid the site linking to yours, the better. Place your product reviews, information on products and services, and company activities on other sites, remembering to put an active link to your site. It’s important not to spam – links should be appropriate. Don’t try to cheat the search engine by using cheats – the penalty for such actions can be quite serious, and will nullify all your previous efforts.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is the promotion of your products or services with useful content for your audience, which should solve:
- Your readers’ objective
- Your objective (to promote your product, service, brand, etc.).
The very concept of “content marketing” has two components – content and marketing.
Content is what you create. It can be text (articles, instructions, cases, etc.), visual (webinars, presentations, infographics, online courses, image clips), auditory (podcasts, tracks).
Marketing – how you promote the created content (with email lists, social networks, paid advertising, media, etc.).
Since most often under the content marketing people understand the preparation and promotion of the text content, let us consider it in detail. For starters we recommend to read “How to write texts about online advertising, if you are not a traffic manager” and “Arguing with your impostor, or How to dare to write the first article for the media”.
The main types of textual content:
- Expert (you share your expertise and gain traction in the marketplace). This type of content is fine if you really have something to tell people. The main goal is to grow a loyal audience, which will then become your customers and brand advocates.
- Teaching (with the help of content you help the audience learn something new for them, of course, this new must be related to your product, which you will be able to offer in passing).
- Selling (or “bribing”). Probably the most common type of content on the Internet. The main goal is to get the user interested (with a cool product, new features or great deals) and motivate them to take the next step that will bring them closer to buying the product/service: sign up for a product demo, leave an application or their contact information.
The content can also be entertaining, hype, or anything else you can think of.
Web analytics
The possibility of detailed analytics and point data collection are the main differences between Internet marketing and classic marketing. Web analytics allows you to understand how users behave on the site and helps businesses improve the effectiveness of their marketing activities.
Web analytics helps businesses:
- look for points of growth,
- To effectively spend the marketing budget,
- look for insights for product development.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is an Internet marketing tool that allows you to build direct communication between your brand and the consumer through email communications (newsletters).
Many people refer to emails as just spam, but they are not. They serve different functions and are extremely useful. For example, there are:
- Trigger emails, which we send to users when they take some key action. They are usually used in welcome chains, introductory emails, and so on.
- Transactional emails are already designed for presales, and to encourage completion of a purchase (e.g., the “abandoned cart” scenario).
- Content emails simply tell your subscribers about interesting service updates and features.
Each type of email is better suited to specific stages of the sales funnel: if you’re trying to get a user back to make a repeat purchase, sometimes it makes more sense to offer them a “new level of difficulty”, and in the introduction stage it’s more important to go over the customer’s pain and describe how your product will help them deal with it.
It’s also important to gather the user base that you will be sending these emails to. There are three most popular options:
- Forming a base during the sign-up process on the site.
- A subscription form on the site that is not linked to the registration form (subscribing to news, blog updates, etc.).
- Leaderboards on the landing pages.