Online marketing

Definition Promotion of goods and services over the internet though coordination of various online strategies, including web advertising, search optimization, email, blogs, social media platforms, and other online technologies

Since its advent during the mid-1990s, online marketing has become a vital part of the overall marketing strategies of most major American companies. The growth of online marketing has overtaken that of traditional marketing. Tens of billions of dollars are spent annually on online marketing.

Advertising on the internet started simply, with companies developing websites and posting advertising (webvertising) in the form of banner advertisements on other websites. This leveraged two of the most important advantages of online marketing: the inexpensive nature of placing advertisements on the internet compared with the cost of traditional media advertisements and the ability to reach a global market instantly.

Online marketing differs from online advertising in that it also includes design, development, and sales as well as incorporating the electronic management of customer data and customer relationships. It grew naturally out of a combination of traditional marketing and online advertising when businesses started to take advantage of many aspects of the internet, including email, social media platforms, blogs, and cookies (a small parcel of text placed on a machine by a web server). Strategies using these technologies were combined and used to focus a business’s effort on specific target markets.

Benefits

The benefits of online marketing over traditional marketing are varied and numerous. One of the largest benefits is the ability to provide a one-on-one approach to marketing because advertisements can be targeted to specific behaviors or interests rather than reaching out to a broad demographic, as traditional marketing does. Online marketing can do this more easily because it is much simpler to keep track of user activity through the use of cookies and through the ease of accessing statistics from web servers. On the average, thousands of pieces of data are collected monthly about each user as the person visits websites. Most web servers have built-in software that can analyze the stored data so that nearly all aspects of a marketing campaign can be measured quickly. The effectiveness of a campaign can be checked constantly, and the campaign can be altered on the fly to take advantage of indicated trends. Traditional marketing results take months to collect and analyze.

Online marketing became ubiquitous as technology continued to spread, a phenomenon that further increased its effectiveness. It can include other wireless media such as smartphones and tablets. Most companies now include their website on the products that they sell, retailers place their website information as well as, increasingly, quick response (QR) codes that can rapidly connect consumers from physical catalogs or documentation through mobile device scanning to web landing pages that can store greater amounts of information, on receipts and in-store literature.

Trends

Web 2.0 technologies brought an even more personal approach to online marketing. Companies can be found on social networking sites and added as a “friend.” A growing list of these sites, used by an ever increasing percentage of the population of all ages, existed by the 2020s, including those like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest that attract vast amounts of traffic. Customers can be constantly provided information on products in which they are interested by reading a company’s blog or subscribing to an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed that supplies them with information about a company or new product as soon as it is released.

Search engine marketing (SEM) has allowed companies to reach their target audience much more quickly than before. Billions of dollars are spent annually on SEM, and it has grown faster than traditional marketing and other online strategies; it has also grown increasingly competitive. Once the target audience is identified, experts use a variety of techniques to get their company listed toward the top of web searches so that consumers looking for a specific product are directed to their company. Advertisements on websites can also be targeted to a specific user who is browsing the site by accessing the user’s browsing history. Search engine optimization (SEO) is also used to drive more organic internet traffic to a company's website.

Online marketing is also much more fluid than traditional marketing. The costs associated with traditional advertising on radio and television and in print do not allow for an easy change in the marketing campaign, so it is usually run until the cost for the campaign is recouped. Online marketing allows companies to test markets much more effectively, and changes to the campaign can be made at little or no cost. Unlike print advertisements, online media have no permanence and allow for fast changes in corporate image and sweeping strategy changes because the website code is very easy to alter.

There are some drawbacks that companies must be aware of when implementing an online marketing strategy. Email campaigns can be seen as spam, so most companies offer consumers the chance to opt out, or to no longer receive the company’s emails. There are also concerns about privacy. Many consumers have an aversion to their browsing habits being tracked and analyzed online. The issues associated with online marketing are regulated in part, and many watchdog groups make sure abuses do not go unnoticed. While efforts were continuing to be made by the beginning of the 2020s to close the digital gap, particularly as the lockdowns and social distancing measures instituted to slow and control the spread of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic in early March highlighted the necessity of the internet for socialization, business transactions, and more, those still with little or limited access to technology can be left out of many campaigns unless there is an intensive effort to coordinate an online campaign with an offline marketing effort.

Tens of billions of dollars are spent every year by businesses of all sizes on online marketing. This medium has grown much faster than marketing in other media by a large percentage and has transformed many industries by taking them almost wholly online, from marketing to product distribution. Online marketing has become crucial for a company to remain competitive.

By the mid-2010s, trends for online marketing included increased focus upon content marketing and creating dedicated marketing tools that conform to various mobile platforms. Internet users became accustomed to blocking pop-ups and ignoring banner ads, making it more important for marketers to create original content that is informational rather than intrusively selling. Additionally, as polls consistently showed that smartphone use had risen among younger populations and devices such as iPads and other tablets were also more accessible and widespread, marketers had to adapt their online strategies to capitalize on being able to effectively reach consumers through that technology as well.

By the 2020s, meanwhile, the practice of using social media influencers to help spread the word about brands and products had become a mainstream business strategy. As people turned to social media for more and more in their lives outside of just connection and communication, companies realized that another personal way to achieve targeted marketing is through collaborating with people considered influential, whether because of the size of their dedicated following on a particular social media platform or because they have gained a widespread reputation as a trusted source for advice, direction, or information in a specific category such as fashion or fitness. These infuencers' significant presence on the web, particularly social media, can be leveraged through partnerships between brands and influential individuals who can virally promote the brand or product through videos, posts, etc., and social media influencers are typically less expensive and easier to work with than full celebrities. One of the biggest industries to capitalize on this form of online marketing was travel, and according to the market research company eMarketer in 2021, the amount of money companies were devoting to funding influencer marketing had already risen and budgets for it would only continue to grow in subsequent years.

Bibliography

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