Marketing Then and Now
Traditionally the function of marketing has been to take your products and services to your target customers. Marketing, in fact encompasses the entire process of identifying customer needs, the required market research, advertising and promotion of products and services. With the ubiquitous nature of the internet, the process of marketing has undergone a fundamental transformation; while advertising and promotion has moved largely to digital media and easily reached without any boundary limitations, the flow of customers and leads is indeed reversed. They are now brought to your products and services, instead of services and products taken to them. This is a paradigm shift. Today it has become marketing of attraction a.k.a. inbound marketing.
What is Online Marketing?
Online marketing also known as Internet Marketing involves promoting and advertising offerings of your business online. In fact with the advance of technology and inventive models of social media platforms, Google Ads and its AdSense platform, email automation and overall marketing automation, mobile marketing, internet marketing has become the norm rather than the privilege and stronghold of a few businesses. Irrespective of their size, most businesses are now practising internet or online marketing. A whole range of such services are offered by Online Marketing Agencies taking full advantage of the power of the internet.
Why Online Marketing?
Isn’t marketing all about reaching your target customers? With over three and a half billion users of the internet and increasing, i.e. 40% of the world’s population, what is better than to take your products, services, advertising and promotion to nearly half the world that is on the internet.
If you look at other live statistics of internet users you will see some discerning numbers. While the highest penetration as a percentage of population is among the developed countries like the US, US, Japan, the European countries, Canada, China tops in absolute numbers while India, the second in line, tops on yearly growth rate of internet users. This gives you an idea of what potential is available at your fingertips.
Given the unprecedented reach of this medium, internet marketing also has become the most inexpensive mode to reach millions in your target market.
How to do it Right? A few words from the Online Marketing Agency Toronto, ReignSearch
The following discussion aims at putting forward an optimum approach to Internet Marketing. It allows you to shortlist and track the most important criteria when drawing up your strategy and plan. It defines the attributes to look for when selecting a partner and also governing the selected partner through implementation.
Start with Your Strategy
Evaluate your goals – define the goals of your digital marketing initiative. Starting from Company level, product wise, market specific and going down to the specifics of platforms, targeted traffic volumes to receive, leads to capture and conversions to make. It is important to get as objective and specific as possible with your key performance criteria.
Target Market and Positioning – you may be hitherto addressing a certain market. With the potential of online marketing, you can re-examine your options and new possibilities. With competition research, hone your message for positioning in your market.
Take a stock – It is good to audit where you are and where you want to go.
With the goals defined, market and positioning identified, the gap between current to desired state lays out your digital marketing strategy. It forms the basis of your online marketing plan with the specifics of implementation, timelines and costs.
In our opinion, this is not a one-time activity. With the evolving landscape of tools, technologies and models, you need revisit and refresh strategies and also assess performance of to steer your marketing plan in the right direction.
Since the technology world is constantly evolving, you need a consulting partner and an expert in Online Marketing to help you with the strategy and the implementation.
Your Online Marketing Agency
You may want to devise your own strategy for Online Marketing or develop one with a Consulting Partner. If you are looking for an Online Marketing Agency, you will find a number of companies that offer a variety of services. Some claim to do it all. Some offers will be too good to be true.
Since Online Marketing covers a wide spectrum of services and the corresponding skillset to support, it is advisable to find a strong and proven partner to guide you with the latest technology solutions.
What are the key attributes to look for? A combination of a savvy marketer and a maven of internet technologies is a must have in a partner to steer your digital journey. At the minimum you need a company that is adept at inbound marketing, including social media services and graphic design. A third and equally important expertise you would seek in your agency partner is the ability to measure results and compute ROI; a data driven company.
The Process
Online marketing initiatives are not only more measurable and data driven, they are more amenable to experimentation as well. Therefore the approach to maximising ROI would be to start small, try different approaches, measure the outcomes and scale the most effective method. This rinse and repeat approach applies to every platform that has the ability to test the market and fine-tune the delivery of its marketing message.
Besides, an estimation of expected ROI and business case gives your business a great level of control over where you are spending your marketing dollars and to make that spend the most effective.
