Today words such as Digital marketing, e-marketing, online marketing and internet marketing can no longer be ignored in the marketing environment and business strategies. These terms are all used for the umbrella term online marketing. But what does this term actually mean? What types of online marketing are there? And what is the importance for companies to use online marketing?
Definition Online marketing
Online marketing concerns all business activities aimed at selling products and services and developing customer relationships via the internet. This includes, for example, the achievement of marketing goals through the internet and other technologies.
The products and services can be brought to the attention by means of various techniques so that organizations can attract potential customers who can then make a purchase. There may also be other goals instead of a purchase, such as taking out a subscription or requesting a quote.
Targets
The most important thing about online marketing is that the activities are always linked to the objectives of the company. Without goals it makes no sense to use online marketing. It is therefore important for a company to formulate marketing objectives and to describe a marketing strategy by means of the objectives.
The objectives that are made for online marketing activities are also called marketing communication objectives. A company can describe a marketing communication strategy by formulating the marketing communication objectives. The marketing communication strategy is also described in the marketing field as the ‘P’ of Promotion that arises from the marketing mix.
Requirements of the objectives
The marketing communication objectives, like all other marketing objectives, must be formulated SMART. This means that a goal is specific, measurable, acceptable, realistic and time-bound. It is therefore the intention that an objective is described as specifically as possible, so that it is easy afterwards to see whether the objective has been achieved within the right time and with the desired result. This makes it easy for companies to analyze afterwards whether the marketing activities have achieved the desired result. If this is not the case, new objectives must be formulated or the current objectives must be adjusted. This may result in the company deploying marketing communications with a completely different strategy,but which ultimately achieves the desired result.
Conversions
The objectives always have a predetermined goal as described earlier. In the online marketing environment, achieving a goal is called conversion. There are different forms of conversions depending on the objectives. The most common forms of conversions are; purchasing products, subscribing to newsletters, contacting us via the contact form and sharing articles via social media. In most cases it concerns an order or payment. The conversion rate is the percentage of website visitors that actually move on to the conversion goal. It is therefore important for a company to analyze whether the conversion goals are being achieved. This makes it important to optimize conversions using various techniques. We will discuss these techniques in detail.
Conclusion
The advantage of a webshop compared to a physical store is that almost everything can be measured. An example of a program that can do this is Google Analytics. Through this program it is possible to measure how many visitors you get, what they search for, but also how many of those visitors place a product in their shopping cart or actually buy the product.
