The term “e-marketing” (or emarketing) encompasses a wide variety of methods for online product and service promotion. Along with its synonyms “internet marketing,” “online marketing,” and “imarketing” it has become a less commonly used phrase, since the internet has become more integrated into the average person’s idea of marketing in general. Nonetheless, people from the brick-and-mortar world who are just jumping into the e-marketing field may want to familiarize themselves with the most commonly used ways of getting online exposure.
In the past, e-marketing would have been more relevant to banner advertising, which showed a rectangular ad at the top of popular sites on the web. Banner ads were purchased by the “impression” so you may have paid several thousand dollars for a quarter-million or more impressions with no guarantee that anyone would actually click through to your site. One of the reasons for the internet crash of the early 2000’s was that people figured out that impression-based advertising didn’t result in revenue. If you are buying this type of advertising today on news sites, it is usually best to make sure the site doesn’t refresh (or reload itself) once per minute, since this would count as another impression.
Impression-based ads have been largely replaced by click-based models like Pay-Per-Click (PPC) marketing, and you can have ads up and running on a site like Google within the space of a few hours. Whenever someone searches for a word or phrase on a search engine, you can trigger an ad to show up next to the search results. This can also be the most expensive e-marketing tactic, since you paying a fee for every time someone clicks on your ad. This type of online marketing works because it is demand-driven and very relevant. PPC marketing is very competitive, so it is generally a good idea to start with a small budget and ramp your way up.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) also fits into the e-marketing universe, and is the older cousin of PPC. Generally speaking, SEO involves making changes to your website to make it more popular on engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo. In the past, many e-marketing agencies would include search engine submission services, and the craft evolved into a bigger set of practices. SEO strategies revolve around search engine algorithms (and what they are looking for) so marketing your site with SEO may involve acquiring links from other sites, adding content to your site specifically for search engines, and making code changes that an ordinary viewer will never see. SEO is also the most rapidly evolving e-marketing practice, because search optimizers need to keep up with search engines, which are always improving their results for the sake of relevance. (Web.com Search Agency provides SEO and PPC Services.)
Blogging is another form of e-marketing, and can either be done by maintaining a blog on your own website, or paying other people to write positive reviews of your products to create “buzz.” Unfortunately, the Federal Trade Commission recently ruled that bloggers need to make more disclosures about sponsored postings, so a pitch about your company may now include a lengthy disclaimer which could affect the credibility of the blogger’s opinion.
Similarly, email marketing was also a bigger tool in the world of emarketing, but regulations have made it harder to legally solicit new customers via email. One way to market yourself via email is to find an industry news source that is regularly emailed and see if they accept advertising or advertorials. Your product or service niche may have a certain interest level in your industry, and you can improve the brand recognition of your company by commenting on certain trends or helping people better understand the features of a service offering.
Some of the newer e-marketing tactics involve social media marketing, which goes through channels like Facebook and Twitter. You can pay to get followers on Twitter, and you can advertise on Facebook through sponsored ads, or by creating widgets that everyone likes to use. You can even tie in your other marketing campaigns by providing links to Facebook and Twitter. Social media can be very labor intensive, since you will always want to add fresh content or promotions to keep the attention of your viewers. It should be noted that some of the same FTC rules for bloggers may affect marketing on Twitter and Facebook, and monetizing a social media campaign is generally more difficult than getting a similar return on other forms of advertising.
The future of e-marketing may bring better opportunities into the market. For instance, Google and Bing are showing a lot more local results for searches, so people serve a specific geographical area may have an advantage if they are properly listed in local search results and online maps. Mobile devices and smartphones are becoming more integrated with online marketing platforms like Google Adwords, so the future of e-marketing will necessarily include wireless devices as connectivity becomes cheaper. Similarly, advertising in video games, which so far features more major brands, may become more common as a tool for small and medium sized businesses. Although the landscape of the emarketing world has changed over the past few years, the diversity of emerging markets (and practices) still makes it possible for a business to succeed on the world of online marketing. While it takes a lot of time and energy to distinguish emerging trends from fads, the rewards of a successful emarketing campaign can be substantial, and more cost effective than the traditional classic marketing trends of the past.
Tags: e-marketing, emarketing
