Internet marketing 101 – Introduction for Small Businesses
Internet Marketing covers a wide range of marketing initiatives, all, at some point, intertwine with each other. The best way to put together a concise Internet marketing strategy is to break it down into smaller sections; each section will form a part of the overall strategy.
Put very simply Internet Marketing is the implementation of internet based technology to market your company, product or service. This could be as simple as emailing your client list with a new product, right through to building complex multimedia collaborative sites where your clients can interact with you, your company and each other.
As well as the content you produce as a company such as websites and email campaigns, Internet Marketing also encompasses the areas of the internet you join in with or collaborate with. In other words, utilising Social Media as part of your strategy is now such a vital componant of an overall Internet marketing campaign.
The Problem
Most companies focus on 2 main elements of the Internet. Their website and the email system they use. Although crucial to any business today, the company’s website in particular tends to be a static pinprick, lost in a billion other websites. Most of our clients want one, but have little idea, in a multi-faceted internet technology world, how to make the most of it.
Internet Marketing today sees the website as playing a part in an overall marketing strategy and not, as in the past, the only way a company can be visible to potential clients.
Compounding the problem is the lack of importance small and medium sized companies put on optimisation of the website. This sounds like it’s some sort of Dark Art, but the concept is really very simple. Firstly, you have to remember why you need to take optimisation seriously. The art of optimising a website is called SEO or Search Engine Optimisation. So what you are doing is looking at the way your site is written and making it as search engine friendly as possible.
Solutions
To get people to know your website exists you need to be able to market it, as we have discussed within these pages, there is no easy way to ensure your website is automatically placed on the front page of the organic listings in search engines like Yahoo or Google without working on the SEO of the site, and even then, if you’re in a competitive market then you may need a different approach to get people to see it.
All sites have to start with looking at SEO, or optimising the site so search engines index it as relevant to the searchers criteria. With the best will in the world, this will take time and effort. If anyone says they can get you there in a week, be very careful, as some, will use what’s called “black hat” techniques which could get your site banned from the search engines altogether. Further information can be found in our guide entitled 6 ways to SEO your site
Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
The other way to get on the front page of the search engines is to pay for it, just like any traditional advertising it cost money, but can be cost effective if done with care and a lot of planning. Warning – PPC can go horribly wrong if not researched well.
PPC is typical of what I said about using different elements in conjunction to put together a Internet Marketing Campaign. Just doing a PPC campaign which points to your existing website can be fatal, unless you have geared your website specifically for this. Most of the time you would design a landing page as the 1st destination whenever someone clicks on your PPC ad link. This landing page could be a specifically written independent site for your PPC campaign or a page within your actual website, again written or designed specifically for the campaign which then directs visitors to the relevant pages within your site to capture the target audience you want to sell to.
If you’re using a data capture form on that landing page, then you step into another area of internet marketing which is the email auto-responder, which automatically responds from the data capture form with an email containing a thank you note and possibly another “call to action” to edge the client towards a position to purchase.
For more information take a look at A basic Internet Marketing Strategy Model:
Email Marketing
Marketing via email has been going on as long as email systems were first invented. It is one of the oldest forms of internet marketing around, and yet even today many small businesses still do not use this system to its full potential. Some of the reasons I get when I working as a consultant is that the company is worried about being seen a spammers!
There is a very simple solution to this and it’s called permission marketing or opt-in marketing. Very simply all you have to do is ask your existing client permission to email them and it’s not spamming.
Building a list of new and existing clients is crutial to being able to market new products and services to them. To do this it is worth investing in online email marketing products such as Constatnt Contact or AWeber. These enable you to market to literally thousands of people and give you the ability with website data capture to build on this list automatically. If you want to subscribe to our newsletter then click here and you will be taken through to our data capture page. Once you fill this in and hit the “Join Business For Life” button firstly you will be taken through to a thank you page and you will also receive an email automatically informing you that we have received your request to be added to our mailing list. You will then start to receive regular newsletters which carry on you education into internet marketing and other related information to help the small busines owner.
This is internet marketing in action.
Social Media
The last aspect I will mention here is Social Media and how it can be used to drive traffic to you main website or landing page as well as using it to increase your brand awareness. I have written a comprehensive article on social media which should be read in conjunction with this post. Go to Social Media and its use in internet marketing
