How Online Marketing Works

Internet Marketing or Online Marketing is the newest and fastest moving form of marketing today.  With the changing landscape of the internet we find new innovations and methods being created every day.  Marketing for your business or organization via the internet is very difficult to understand initially.

Understanding complex systems requires that we break it down into small bite size pieces and then explain how each piece works.  Just like a car engine or computer, the smaller peices are easier to explain.  Once each piece is explained we can then put all the pieces back together and hopefully will form a complete understanding of the system.

Core Assets

The Website

The internet marketing system requires a vehicle to deliver results.  Usually this is done via a website but can also be done through other ways.  A rising technology is how applications work.  Applications are somewhat different than a typical website due to the programming needed to create them.  Without going into too much detail, applications are more difficult to deliver than a basic website depending on features required.  For now we will stick with using a website for online marketing purposes.

SEO

Search Engine Optimization is important in many ways for internet marketing.  It is a core foundation for how your website gets indexed "categorized" by search engines.  Everything about how the website is built, the content, and the design should all fit within a SEO strategy.

Marketing Automation

When you start working with complex analysis and data about visitors on your website and how they are interacting, there emerges a need to develop automation to take care of mundane tasks.  For example, if someone is filling out a form for an offer on your website to download a whitepaper or ebook you would want to follow up with this as a potential lead.  But what happens when you get thousands of leads?  Then you'll want to automatically add those emails into lists for email marketing.  Even better if you have it set up to automatically segment those emails into separate lists.

Strategy

Attract the Right Customers

This is part of the attraction phase of the process which means we are simply trying to attract the right kind of visitors to your website.  A lot of people get caught up in the numbers and simply want as much traffic as possible.  This is actually a bad approach due to few factors.  The first is spam and what happens when visitors who aren't your potential customers are coming to the website.  These unwanted visitors could actually be causing problems with server load, filling out forms for spam actions like soliciiting for work, or even hackers.  We want to target our visitors so that unwanted traffic is filtered out.  

By optimizing the website for core services, creating content your buyer personas are searching for, and optimizing the experience on your website is how we do customer optimization.

Start building your buyer personas first.  Learn How > 

Campaigns

So you've got your website built, you've done basic SEO, and you have marketing automation set up to capture leads, now what?  Well, don't sit around and wait for people to show up because they won't.  You've built a Ferrari so are you going to leave it in the garage? No, you're going to get on the race track!

Campaigns are built around your potential customers needs and wants.  Promotions are for different stages of the buyer journey.  A very simplistic view of this is as follows:

• Ads - Top of the funnel for brand awareness.  This is a good place for Pay Per Click ads. Facebook ads.
• Retargeting - After visiting a few ecommerce websites you start seeing ads on Facebook for the products you were viewing.
• Coupons and discounts - Closer to the bottom of the funnel, ready to make a decision.

Start with a vision of how many customers you want to grow and work backwards on how to how to execute.