Online Marketing

Definition: Online marketing is a method that uses the internet to promote or transmit a message about a company’s product and services to the potential buyers or target audience.

Online Marketing Communication Options

• Website: A company must design its website that considers its purpose, products, services, mission and vision. A website should look interesting to view to encourage multiple visits. A website must have the following 7Cs in order to be competent:
  
  • Content: It can have graphics, sound, text and video.
  • Context: It means the layout and design of a website.
  • Customization: It refers to the site’s ability to provide results according to the customer’s requirements.
  • Communication: It should establish two-way communication with the user.
  • Community: It facilitates user to user communication.
  • Connection: The extent to which one site provides links to the other sites.
  • Commerce: A site should assist in commercial transactions as well.

There are certain parameters on the basis of which the visitors can observe the performance of the website. These parameters are: how much user-friendly a site is? And how much attractive it is?

A site’s user-friendliness can be ascertained by landing page, navigation to other pages, downloading capability. On the other hand, physical attractiveness is determined by viewability, readability, colours used and so forth.

• Search Ads: Pay-per-click ads is the most important element of the Search Ads.When a visitor searches any term on the search engine, the ad of the marketers appear either on the top of the results or next to it, on the basis of the bidding by the marketer and the search engine’s algorithm, to identify its significance with respect to the keyword searched. Only when the visitor clicks on the ads, advertisers pay for it.
  
  Search Engine Optimization (SEO) entails the activities that improve the probability that a particular link will appear in the top among all the non-paid links when the visitor searches for a particular keyword.
  
• Display Ads: Display ads or otherwise called as banner ads are the one that appears in a tiny rectangular box that encompasses text and sometimes graphics, which marketers pay on the placement on specific websites.The cost depends on the traffic on a website, meaning that the more the number of visitors, higher is the cost.
• E-Mail: E-mail is quite productive and reasonable selling tools as it enables advertisers to message in order to communicate with a large audience base at a comparatively low cost.
• Social Media Marketing: It is one of the emerging modes of marketing these days. Consumers share their videos, audios, texts, and images through various social media platforms Facebook, Twitter, Google plus, Instagram, Linkedin, Pinterest, etc. with their friends, relatives, acquaintances and companies.
  
  It facilitates the marketers to make their presence online and connect with their customers directly

Advantages of Online Marketing

1. A company can grow faster and reach the target audience through a broader range of marketing elements.
2. It has a competitive advantage over traditional means of marketing.
3. It is easy to trace the number of unique visitors, average session duration, click on an ad, and so forth.
4. Contextual placement is one of the important features of online marketing wherein the marketers can buy ads on the websites which akin to their own products and services.
5. Marketers can also place the ads on the basis of the keywords typed by the customers on Google and other search engines like Bing and Yahoo, to reach the target audience.

Disadvantages of Online Marketing

1. Fake clicks on the ads done by software-powered websites.
2. Hacking of the website is possible, which results in the loss of control over the messages.
3. Lack of tangibility

Nevertheless, the advantages of online marketing supersede its disadvantages. As nowadays people spend most of their time surfing on the internet, it instigates marketers all around the world, to advertise their offerings online for broader reach and better results.