Online Marketing - The Many Ways to Advertise on the Internet
Having a nice website may not be enough to be visible on the Internet, win new clients, increase the sales and take full advantage of the many benefits of online presence. In fact, even the best ranked and most visited websites invest quite a lot in online marketing. The good news is that you don’t have to spend a fortune to improve visibility through advertising. And what is even better is that with a relatively small investment, you can achieve big results. Listed below are just a few of many ways to advertise on the Internet regardless of your advertising budget.
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Email marketing. One of the oldest, simplest and most effective ways to advertise your business online is to send promotional emails, of course, if you have a customer database. Keep in mind, however, that email marketing is utilised by just about everyone and that many promotional emails end up in junk mail without ever being open or read. To prevent this from happening to your emails, don’t bombard your customers. Instead, send them out only when you have something important to share.
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Search engine marketing (SEM). It refers to a form of online marketing which is very popular with both small businesses and large multinational corporations. It involves a display of paid promotional material in search engine results pages (SERP), typically above the actual search results. SEM shouldn’t be confused with SEO or search engine optimisation which is focused on improving a website’s visibility in SERP.
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Display advertising. Another popular online marketing technique involves advertising on websites with related content, usually in the form of banner ads but there are also other formats including text, images, video and flash.
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Social media marketing. Like its name suggests, social media marketing is a form of advertising that uses social media such as Facebook, Twitter and others. It can be in the form of official announcements and messages about products/services, events, news, etc. through company profiles but it can also take an unofficial form, that is spreading a message between users via word of mouth.
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Mobile advertising. This form of advertising involves the use of mobile phones and other mobile devices. It originally involved sending SMSs and MMSs but after the advent of modern smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices, mobile marketing became increasingly focused on mobile app install ads.