Internet marketing (often erroneously called SEM) refers to the tactics and strategies involved with optimizing the visibility, traffic, sales and branding of Internet content – typically that which is found on a websites or business blogs. For websites, this first involves methods used to “search engine optimize” (called SEO) the “free” search engine results you see on the major search engines. This, in turn, helps achieve better branding, visibility and sales. There’s also the use of pay-per-click (PPC) search engine advertising.
I don’t intend to go into detail regarding SEO and SEM techniques in this article. Instead, I’d like to speak more about “other” marketing methods used by Internet marketing companies. First, there’s social networking media sites. It’s important to note that recent marketing surveys indicate that there’s too much “hype” on the importance of many social networking sites for many businesses (based on their user demographics versus business demographics). But even so, there’s still marketing potential in a few social networking sites in particular. Basically, the reason for getting involved with any social media site is to build a community by being an active participant. This means you need to “get the word out” on news, new products and/or services, specials, etc. This way, you’ll not just be getting your information out to your existing audience, but you’ll be growing your audience through a community of users. But this will only work if the demographics fit.
RSS feeds are also a great real-time tool for building your audience. Used on many blogs (like this one) as well as on websites (and more and more on smartphones), they’re a great way to provide focused real-time information to people who want it (so subscribe to our blog!). This approach still has a ways to go though with smartphones. But it’s potential in this area is vast – especially in the video podcasting area.
Finally, there’s email marketing (yes, something that can be a pain to those who are being spammed). However, it’s a technique that can be quite valuable to those who’ve opted in. Newsletter marketing is really nothing more than a barbaric form of RSS feed – but it works. Its reach is its limiting factor though (since anyone can find and subscribe to an RSS feed topic and read them via email or through most browsers).
Well that’s all for now, but this is just a taste of some of the topics to come.
Thanks for the good overview to the novice (that’s me). I’m a traditional marketing manager with some knowledge of website marketing. We have a corporate website that needs to rank better – and I’ve been given the responsibility to do this. The problem I see is that I’m having to do all this “SEO”, due to layoffs, and I really don’t have the expertise needed. My increased workload and limited success has made it clear to me, that it’s an Internet marketing professional we need to either hire, or, work with on some level! Please keep providing your insight though – thanks.