The aim of every business owner is to see its business flourishing by leaps and bounds. So what are the steps that need to be taken in order to achieve growth? Marketing your product in the right way is one of the essential requisites for a business to grow. The traditional ways of marketing are of help but today we are living in a completely digitalized world. Internet marketing or digital marketing or online marketing is the trend of the hour.
What is Internet Marketing?
Internet marketing refers to the use of web-based channels for marketing your product. Promotion, marketing and advertising the product, everything is done online. There are different ways of digital marketing such as social media marketing, content marketing and SEO (Search Engine Optimization), etc.
The popularity of digital marketing has increased many folds, particularly because more and more people are going online and spending hours using social media and other stuff. Nowadays people spend a lot of time on their smartphones. It’s just impossible for a business to imagine its growth without going online. You can gain a lot of customers through your blogs, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. In fact, it’s a great way to reach more and more customers and that too very easily.
If you want to use internet marketing for your business, then it’s very much important for your business to have its online presence. If you are wondering how to build a business website for free, then you should check out various blogging platforms like Ning, WordPress, Blogger, etc.
A boon for Small Businesses
A small business or a start-up doesn’t have much money and manpower as well as time to invest in the traditional ways of marketing. But with the internet boom and advent of digital marketing techniques, now the small businesses can also compete with their high profile counterparts.
Uber is one such example. The startup has its roots in San Francisco and with its solid consumer-focused online presence it gives more than 5.5 million rides a day! Really a huge number. Uber has successfully used online reviews and recommendations and offers free rides to those who give referral codes to their friends. The layout of its website is very attractive and audience appreciates their fun social media posts.
Uber did its digital marketing homework right and became the second-ever venture-capital-backed startup after Facebook, to pass a $50 billion value.
Let’s take a look at some of the benefits of digital marketing offers.
- Powerful form of marketing– helped companies to reach and engage maximum number of customers than ever before.
- Most cost-effective way of marketing– the small businesses have been particularly benefited since they can’t afford the traditional ways with limited budget and space.
- Most measurable form of marketing– you can easily track the success of your digital marketing campaign which is not possible in case of the traditional strategies like radio or emails. You can know what is working for you and what is not. This helps in improving your future marketing endeavors and channeling your efforts in the right direction.
- Allows targeting your ideal buyers– SEO allows to reach customers who are searching the content and topics related to your business. Therefore, through digital marketing, it is possible to make sure that the right consumers are viewing your content. Pay-per-click, display, and social media advertising enable to target those who are most likely to be interested in your products or services. This is decided on the basis of demographic information and general characteristics. You can reach to the maximum number of audience without increasing marketing budget and resources. The efforts are also not wasted.
- More and more first time buyers prefer buying stuffs online– now this is a great advantage to internet marketing. People now-a-days first search online for the products or services they intend to buy. They look for the answers to their questions and the solution to their problems first online. It has been researched that 93% of online experiences start with a search engine.
Conclusion
Digital marketing is the future and to prove this statement it can be mentioned here that U.S. will be spending $120 billion on digital marketing in 2020. This amounts to almost half of the total expenditure on media. The amount spent on social ads will almost double from 2016 to 2021. Similar would be the case with display ads and online videos.
Internet marketing has outperformed the conventional ways of marketing. Today most people prefer online content. So your business is not going to grow without it.