Internet marketing, also known as digital marketing, web marketing, online marketing, or e-marketing, is the marketing of products or services over the internet.
Internet marketing is sometimes considered to be broad in scope because it not only refers to marketing on the Internet, but also includes marketing done via e-mail and wireless media. Management of digital customer data and electronic customer relationship management (ECRM) systems are also often grouped together under internet marketing.
Internet marketing ties together creative and technical aspects of the Internet, including design, development, advertising, and sales. Internet marketing also refers to the placement of media along many different stages of the customer engagement cycle through search engine marketing (SEM), search engine optimization (SEO), banner ads on specific websites, email marketing, and Web 2.0 strategies. In 2008, The New York Times—working with comScore—published an initial estimate to quantify the user data collected by large Internet-based companies. Counting four types of interactions with company websites in addition to the hits from advertisements served from advertising networks, the authors found the potential for collecting data upward of 2,500 times on average per user per month.
Business models
Internet marketing is associated with several business models:
E-commerce: In this model, goods are sold directly to consumers (B2C), businesses (B2B), or from consumer to consumer(c2c).
Lead-based Websites: A strategy whereby an organization generates value by acquiring sales leads from its website.
Affiliate Marketing: The process in which a product or service developed by one entity (e-commerce business, single person, or a combination) is sold by other active sellers for a share of profits.
The entity of the product may provide some marketing material (sales letter, affiliate link, tracking facility); however, the vast majority of affiliate marketing relationships come from e-commerce businesses that offer affiliate programs.
Local Internet Marketing: Strategy through which a small company utilizes the Internet to find and nurture relationships that are to be used for real-world advantage. Local Internet marketing uses tools such as social media marketing, local directory listing,[2] and targeted online sales promotions.
White hat Marketing: This form of Internet marketing follows all of the acceptable practices for the search engines.
Gray hat Marketing: This is when the practices are not specifically deceptive or abusive but lie in an area not specifically defined blackhat but still not entirely white hat.
Black at Marketing: This is a form of Internet marketing that employs deceptive, abusive, or less than truthful methods to drive web traffic to a website or affiliate marketing offer. This method sometimes includes spam, cloaking within search engine result pages, or routing users to pages they didn't initially request.
One-to-one approach
The targeted user is typically browsing the Internet alone and therefore the marketing messages can reach the user personally.[citation needed] This approach is used in search marketing, where the advertisements are based on search engine keywords entered by the users on the computer. This approach usually works under PPC (pay per click) method. With the advent of Web 2.0 tools, many users can interconnect as "peers."
Appeal to specific interests
Internet marketing and geo marketing places an emphasis on marketing that appeals to a specific behavior or interest, rather than reaching out to a broadly defined demographic. "On- and Offline" marketers typically segment their markets according to age group, gender, geography, and other general factors. Marketers have the luxury of targeting by activity and geolocation. For example, a kayak company might post advertisements on kayaking and canoeing websites with the full knowledge that the audience has a related interest.
Internet marketing differs from magazine advertisements, where the goal is to appeal to the projected demographic of the periodical, but rather the advertiser has knowledge of the target audience—people who engage in certain activities (e.g., uploading pictures or contributing to blogs).
Niche Marketing
Niche and hyper-niche internet marketing put further emphasis on creating specialist destinations for web users and consumers on tightly targeted topics and products. Niche marketers differ from traditional Internet marketers as they have a more specialized topic knowledge. For example, whereas in traditional Internet marketing a website would be created and promoted on a high-level topic such as kitchen appliances, niche marketing would be something much more specific such as 4-slice toasters.
Niche marketing provides end users of such sites very targeted information, and allows the creators to establish themselves as authorities on the topic or product.
Geo-targeting
Geo targeting (in Internet marketing) and geo marketing are the methods of determining the geolocation of a website visitor with geolocation software, and delivering different content to that visitor based on his or her locatiion, such as latitude and longitude, country, region or state, city, metro code or zip code, organization, Internet Protocol (IP) address, ISP, and other criteria.
