Online Marketing, SEO & Branding

Online marketing is a necessary form of advertising given that millions of people spend time on the Internet on a daily basis. It is pretty simple to pay for ad space on the Internet, and there are many different marketing tools that are quite popular for online marketing strategies. But online marketers must walk a fine line between making people aware of what they’re trying to promote and making sure they are not bombarding people with too much advertising. Research published in 2011 showed that about 80 percent of people age 25-34 left one of their favorite websites because the advertising became too intrusive. Nonetheless, online marketing is a booming business and has proven to be incredibly successful at getting products’ names out to more people.

There are several key tools frequently used in online marketing. One is known as Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. SEO is a tool that helps keep certain websites at the top of search engine keyword search lists. A tool known as a “crawler” (or “Googlebot” for Google) searches the Internet for websites with particular keywords and then stores them in giant databases. Then, when a person types a particular keyword into a search engine, the crawler immediately able to go to the databases and pick out the websites that include that keyword in their text. The online marketing trick is to make sure that when a website is designed, it includes certain keywords throughout the website that the marketer expects its target audience to type into a search engine. The crawler will recognize the website as relevant to the search and voila – the site pops up on the target audience’s search and he or she clicks on it.

Another type of online marketing tool is called Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising. This is a technique in which an online marketer places an ad for his service or product onto a specific website, and the ad links to the marketer’s own website. Each time a person clicks on the link, the website owner is paid a small sum by the online marketer and the person who clicked on the ad is taken directly to the marketer’s website, which means the marketing strategy worked. One of the better-know
PPC providers is Google’s AdWords. Here, ads are usually linked to specific keyword searches that then show up in a “sponsored links” toolbar. This is a successful marketing tool because it automatically shows up in keyword searches of the audience the online marketing strategy was hoping to attract.

Online marketing via email is also a highly used tool, although it must be carefully done because most people today have “spam” folders where junk mail can immediately go if the person is not interested in reading it. Therefore, one of the more popular things to do with email is for businesses to use it for listserv purposes. Businesses, for example, will create a monthly newsletter and send it to customers and clients who voluntarily placed their name on the email list. Or businesses can use these listservs to send out announcements about promotions and events that the business is hosting. This keeps customers aware of what is going on at their favorite companies, plus, it offers them incentives to continue receiving the newsletters because often times there are coupons and benefits available only to those people who are signed up to receive the email.