Out of the Middle Ages: Why Marketing Without Online Promotion Makes No Sense

24.09.2019 | Marketing Strategy, SEO

Dmytro Romanovskyi, Director and Founder of the internet marketing agency Destra

The time has come when businesses can no longer ignore the internet. People spend a huge amount of time online — sometimes even more than offline. It would be foolish not to use every possible opportunity to draw their attention to your product during this time. That’s why articles about internet marketing are becoming increasingly popular. Everyone understands it’s necessary, but not everyone knows what it is or how it works. The topic is vast — no wonder there are courses on it that can last weeks, months, or even years. Nevertheless, it’s possible to grasp the general outlines quite quickly. That’s what we’ll do.

Internet marketing: definition and differences from traditional marketing

Internet marketing is a set of activities aimed at attracting clients and increasing profit. On the internet, in dictionaries, and on Wikipedia you’ll find plenty of different definitions, but in general they all boil down to this. Essentially, it’s almost the same as traditional marketing, only it operates within the environment of the World Wide Web. And of course, it has its own rules and laws. Here are some differences that must be used to your advantage:

The ability to target advertising messages only to representatives of the target audience, without affecting those who are not interested in your product.
Receiving feedback from buyers and potential clients, the ability to communicate with them and establish closer contact.
The ability to track the results of your actions, analyze audience response, and adjust future behavior according to the data obtained.

In traditional marketing, all this is impossible. With advertising on the street, on TV, or on the radio, you never know how many people saw it, who it influenced, or who bought your product afterward. On the internet, tracking this data is possible. Similarly, on the radio many people hear about you who don’t need your services. Online advertising can be targeted precisely to specific segments that are interested in you.

Achieving goals is very difficult without a strategy. The main goal of internet marketing is to ensure a flow of profit from the internet. From there, many smaller goals can be defined. For example, one of them might be “to turn website traffic into leads, and then into customers.” The strategy is built on the basis of three points:

Target audience.
Study of the competition.
Setting goals and choosing methods and channels to achieve them.

It’s best to start with studying the target audience. Only after you understand who your potential clients are, what they are interested in, including which websites they visit and which social networks they use, can you decide what to do with that information. You’ll be able to choose the right communication channels, create effective content for them, and determine the tone in which to deliver advertising and other messages. Otherwise, all your actions will be like trying to find a black cat in a dark room.

For building an internet marketing strategy, it’s also important to identify competitors in your own and related fields. You need to understand which niches they already occupy, where they get the most traffic from, which promotion methods they use, and study their strengths and weaknesses. After that, your task is to clearly define your competitive advantages, choose the channels through which you can most effectively communicate about yourself, and plan the methods you’ll use to do so.

Why a strategy is needed in internet marketing and how it is built

Directions of online marketing

There are quite a few directions in internet marketing. It all depends on the perspective you take. For example, you can talk about content marketing, video marketing, affiliate marketing. However, all of them are used within certain promotion channels. It’s these channels that are most often the basis, with several main directions highlighted:

Website or landing page, SEO.
Social media.
Email marketing (you can get a consultation on this service here).
Contextual and targeted advertising.

As a rule, all of these are used in combination. However, it’s important to keep in mind that not all channels will suit your business. At the very least, they will work with varying degrees of effectiveness. Therefore, you shouldn’t expect the number of sales from social networks to be the same as from a website — especially if you’ve been promoting that website for 5–10 years already.

Internet marketing: website or landing page

To showcase your products, you need to have your own platform. There are two main options: a landing page (a single page on the internet) or a website — a collection of such pages. A landing page has a design, sales text, product or service photos, and calls to action. A website has all of that too, but it can also include multiple sections, a catalog with product cards, a blog, etc. Often business owners can’t decide which option suits them better. Some even doubt the need for a website at all, since sales are doing fine through social networks.

It all depends on your product or service and your goals. Let’s say you sell planners. Only 4 types of layouts, a few color options, and one price for all. Obviously, there’s no sense in creating a multi-page site — there’s simply nothing to put there with such a limited product line. A landing page with quality photos, engaging text, and “Buy,” “Order,” “Call” buttons is a more logical solution.

But if you have hundreds of such notebooks with different covers, prices, etc., then it makes sense to create an online store with a convenient catalog and photos of all the products. Landing pages can achieve conversion rates of up to 50% if you drive the right target audience there, the product is excellent, and the price is attractive. Multi-page websites can’t boast that kind of conversion — they work a bit differently. It’s important to understand this and not be discouraged by such results — it’s normal.

Don’t forget that no matter how nice and user-friendly your website is, it won’t sell if you don’t drive traffic to it. You do this with the same methods:

Direct people there from social networks.
Set up advertising.
Use SEO promotion.

Only this way will potential customers, who are ready to buy, arrive on your site. Next, we’ll look at these methods in more detail.

Internet marketing and advertising on social networks

The topic of promotion on social networks is quite broad and is handled by SMM specialists (social media marketing). The idea is that you create brand pages on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter — and actively try to attract your audience’s attention. Often this is done purely for branding purposes. People learn about you, subscribe, engage in interactions, and follow the news.

This approach is mostly used by large brands or those offering various services. You probably won’t be able to order a Coke or a McDonald’s burger via Instagram — their accounts aren’t made for sales. But clothing, shoes, cosmetics — that’s another story. Some stores don’t even have websites, just Facebook and Instagram pages, and that’s enough. Especially considering that platforms like Facebook already have online shopping functions similar to regular e-commerce stores.

Here, a major emphasis is placed on content marketing:

Beautiful, high-quality product photos
Interesting, engaging texts
Videos — the growing trend of recent years

The more creative the content, the higher the chance it will go viral and attract a wide audience to your brand. That’s why it’s important to give this a lot of attention, while also not forgetting about advertising and other promotion methods. Without them, your creative page will remain empty, because no one will even know it exists.

Advertising is set up through the Facebook ad manager and is called targeted advertising because it’s aimed precisely at a specific target audience or one of its segments. Besides social networks, you’ve surely seen ads on regular websites and even in apps — those are called contextual ads and are managed through Google’s and Yandex’s separate services.

Analytics in internet marketing

Analytics is one of the main advantages of internet marketing over traditional marketing. What could be better for a business than clear numbers and graphs? They show whether you’re moving in the right direction or not, allow you to test your ideas and target audience segments, and adjust your development path. Analytics is becoming more powerful every year and offers plenty of new opportunities. For example, you can track how many people visit your site, where they came from, which pages they viewed, and what they clicked on. Almost all social networks have their own analytics systems, and many developers create third-party services for this. For websites, tools like Google Analytics, Yandex Metrica, Similarweb, and others are used.

This, in general, is what internet marketing looks like. You define your target audience and interaction channels, deliver advertising messages, drive people to the site, and track how they behave, whether there are conversions, etc. Then you analyze the results, adjust your next steps, and repeat the cycle. The key thing to remember is that in internet marketing, there are no universal ready-made solutions for all types of business. You need to test everything, and then you’ll find your ideal path to achieving your goals.

SEO promotion in internet marketing

SEO (search engine optimization) is the optimization of a website for search engines. This involves:

High-quality, useful content on your topic
Keywords in the texts, proper meta tags
Clean and correct site code
Website speed
The time users spend there and their convenience

In reality, there are many more factors, but these are the main ones. They relate to internal optimization. There is also external optimization — placing links to your site on other resources. Such links can be purchased through special services and integrated organically into articles. In addition, they can be placed on social networks, in partner materials, etc. Altogether, this should bring the site to the top of Google and Yandex search results, where people will find it by their queries instead of numerous competitors.