The Tricky Business Of Online Marketing

The first step in embarking on an online marketing campaign is understanding how the technology works. And this begins with a well designed and developed website. Although it is not essential to get tied up in the technical complexities of how a website works, it is important to have a fair understanding on how to use it effectively for marketing purposes. 

The online marketer needs to know the vital features of their website, with respect to marketing, and how to leverage them for maximum advantage. They need to be able to tweak meta-data, that are required by their marketing platforms of choice. Be it organic social media reach, or paid advertising, or organic search reach. 

By leveraging the website features, and integrating them as an integral part of an online marketing campaign, remarkable results can be achieved. Marketing online can be carried out through organic search, and social media marketing campaigns or through pay per click advertising based on search.

Organic search is the most technical of the approaches, which involves search engine optimization, and requires advanced website management, and control to achieve. With this approach, the online marketer is targeting the millions of people who carry out web searches every day. 

As a user of the Web, you undoubtedly are familiar with the search results on search engines, such as Google or Bing. Organic search results are displayed based on relevance, without the marketer paying for better placement of adds. These results, are not marked as ads, in the search engine results pages. 

The best ranking pages appear at the top of the search result pages, and are more likely to get clicked on. This means more visitors visit the website, and purchase products as a result. Search engine optimization is usually a long process, that involves the online marketers producing content, that makes them relevant to search engines. 

The time and effort invested in search engine optimization is worth it, and rewarding, since it highly targets searchers, who often have clear intent, of what they are looking for when they carry out a search.

Pay per click advertising delivers faster results, for the amount of time and effort invested in setting up a marketing campaign. Adverts can be placed with search engines such as Google or Bing, as well as social networks, with the likes of  Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin. 

The idea behind pay per click, is to display your ads, and only bill you when your add gets clicked on. Your ads will compete with other ads in an auction system, to determine what rate you are going to pay, for having your ads displayed to your target audience.

 There is a lot of flexibility on who you can target your ads to, such that they are only display to certain demographics. For instance, you may target your audience to a specific location such as a country, or a city, and on social networks such as Facebook, you may even target according to age groups, and occupation. All this targeting, results in highly refined delivery of ads. 

Marketing on social media can also be carried out organically, by building social capital with users of a social network, instead of advertising directly to them, and paying for the results. This requires the building, and maintenance of social relationships in the long run.