What are the advantages and tools of online marketing?

Online marketing, internet marketing or web marketing. These are all synonymous names for marketing that uses the virtual space for promotion. It should also be said that digital marketing and online marketing are not the same thing. Most digital marketing channels are closely tied to online marketing, but it is not the same term. The difference between digital and online marketing is that online marketing is a part of digital marketing.

Online marketing is a set of tools and methods used to promote a brand, products and services over the internet. The aim is to reach prospective customers through channels where they spend time reading, searching, shopping or communicating online.

The advantages of online marketing

Reach

Thanks to the internet, advertising today no longer has to be only local — we can do it worldwide. Every kind of company, from multinationals to small and medium enterprises, has access to millions of prospective customers.

Availability

Online marketing lets us advertise 24 hours a day, every day. Customers have access to the web and can buy goods and services regardless of the time.

Measurability

Thanks to online marketing it is far simpler to evaluate how effective our advertising is. It gives us data on the basis of which we can measure and track results, which is not possible with traditional marketing. The results give a company a better idea of how a marketing campaign is doing — how many people bought from it, submitted a form, or by how much our site traffic went up.

An individual approach

Thanks to social media, businesses can get much closer to customers and also adapt the communication between them. We can segment customers and adapt ads to them, for instance on the basis of their buying habits, interests, age, gender or their behaviour on the website.

Low costs

Thanks to online marketing, businesses can avoid the high costs of traditional forms of advertising. Online marketing is far cheaper than television or radio advertising and various billboards.

The tools of online marketing

• SEO
• PPC
• Content marketing
• Email marketing
• Social media

SEO

SEO is short for Search Engine Optimization. It is a process of optimisation thanks to which we can place websites as high as possible in unpaid search results.

Optimisation is made up of two elements:

• On-page - adjustments made directly on the website so that the site is technically agreeable to users. This includes:
  - the page title,
  - the URL structure,
  - the website's structure,
  - page content, headings,
  - image titles,
  - link text.
• Off-page - these happen outside the website and cannot be influenced by the site's owner in any way. These are backlinks pointing to the website from other sources, and the more popular the site is, the more search engines favour it.

PPC

PPC is short for Pay Per Click. This form of online marketing is considered one of the most effective. That is partly because you pay for the ad only when someone clicks it. PPC advertising most often shows on the basis of words searched for in internet search engines. The most used search engine, not only in Slovakia but worldwide, is Google, along with its PPC advertising platform Google Ads.

There are several kinds of PPC ad:

• search ads
• display ads (banners)
• YouTube (video) campaigns
• shopping (product) campaigns
• app campaigns
• maximum performance campaigns - Performance Max
• smart campaigns
• discovery campaigns

Content marketing

Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and promoting valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and win a clearly defined audience. It is, for instance, a blog, an e-book, an informational PDF and so on. It takes a lot of work and above all creativity, but without quality content we will not stand out and Google will push us into the background in organic search and favour better content.

Email marketing

Emailing is among the very effective forms of online marketing. It means sending promotional emails to customers who consented to receiving them (a newsletter). It is one of the most effective forms of communication where brand building is concerned, partly because by sending emails regularly a company keeps itself in customers' minds. Working with databases and using all the data for the most precise targeting possible matters too. A quality database is one of the preconditions of successful email marketing.

Social media

Social media marketing uses social media platforms to connect with an audience and build brand awareness, increase sales or website traffic. It includes publishing quality content on social media profiles and also listening to and engaging followers. Here we commonly use social networks such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and YouTube.

Note: social media does not serve only for publishing photos or posts, it is also an excellent place for PPC advertising.