How Internet Marketing Company Works

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Internet marketing is the most inexpensive way to reach your target market, regardless of the size of your business. With the growth of technology, it’s crucial that you have an effective Internet marketing plan in place. Internet marketing helps you continue to grow your business.

Businesses with websites have to know how to reach and attract consumers online, and many of these businesses would rather pay someone to do their online marketing for them rather than deal with it themselves. Internet marketing services are in high demand.

Starting an online marketing business involves promoting yourself first, then demonstrating to potential clients what you can do for them. We will discuss more on what an internet company is and how to benefit from it.

What is Internet Marketing?
What Do Internet Marketing Specialists Do?
How to Start an Internet Marketing Company
Advantages and Disadvantages of Running an Internet Marketing Company
Why Should You Invest in Internet Marketing?
How Important is Internet Marketing to Your Business
How Internet Marketing Works
What are the Types of Internet Marketing

What is Internet Marketing?

Internet Marketing (also known as emarketing, web marketing, or digital marketing) is an all-inclusive term for marketing products and/or services online – and like many all-inclusive terms, internet marketing means different things to different people.

While the obvious purpose of internet marketing is to sell goods, services or advertising over the internet, it’s not the only purpose a business using internet marketing may have; a company may be marketing online to communicate a message about itself (building its brand) or to conduct research.

Read Also: What is Marketing Channels?

Online marketing can be a very effective way to identify a target market or discover a marketing segment’s wants and needs. (Learn more about conducting market research).

Essentially, though, internet marketing refers to the strategies that are used to market a product or service online, including:

Website design strategies
Search engine optimization and search engine submission
Online promotions
Reciprocal linking
Email marketing
Social media
Blogging
Digital advertising
Article marketing
Affiliate programs
Video/Podcasting

What Do Internet Marketing Specialists Do?

An internet specialist helps businesses build online marketing plans and, in some cases, to implement and manage those plans. Internet specialists help businesses promote their products and services using online marketing strategies. For instance, Personal reputation management specialists, help to build a business’s reputation by removing negative material online whilst generating and promoting the positive.

You might act as a consultant, assessing the businesses’ current situation, identifying strategies, setting up systems, then turning over the actual tactics to the business. Or you might be hired to implement and manage the internet marketing plan on an ongoing basis.

Some examples of internet services include:

Search engine optimization (SEO)
Email marketing
Social media marketing
Article marketing
Web content freelance writing
Pay per click (PPC) advertising

How to Start an Internet Marketing Company

Educate Yourself

Before beginning, it’s important to educate yourself and understand as much as possible about internet marketing for agencies. Some of the most successful people in the world never stop learning. So, invest your time and money in learning. You’ll also want to have an understanding of the industry as well.

Some different concepts you’ll want to understand are PPC (pay-per-click marketing), SEO, email marketing campaigns, and creating online funnels. You’ll also want to understand graphic design and content marketing as well.

Do Competitor Research

When starting any business, you’ll want to know how you’ll rank against the competitors. When you research your competitors, you’ll then be able to understand how to surpass them.

To do competitor analysis, you’ll want to use the same keywords your business would use online. Narrow down your competition to about 10-15 competitors.

Once you’ve discovered your competition, check out how they’re monetizing (obtaining their money). Then you can learn what their methods are and what’s successful.

Some examples of monetization methods are:

Donation, commission, coaching
Selling a digital or physical product
Lead generation, affiliate sales, advertising

Identify at least one method per competitor

Once you’ve figured out how they monetize, you can then determine their content marketing strategy. Take a look at their blog posts, social media, and SEO. As far as content is it in the form of podcasts, blogging, or videos?

Then, take a look at how they communicate with their customers. After this, determine if you’d like to use a similar content marketing strategy, or differ.

Set a Business Model

There are numerous ways you can bill your client, and how is up to you. One choice is where they pay you by the hour. This is good for when you have one or shorter tasks. When you start scaling up it can be trickier.

A flat retainer is a simple pricing model. This is a flat fee for the month. Just make sure to have rules as far as if a client quits early or scales up with their requirements.

The next pricing model is the percentage of spending. This makes sure your agency will receive the correct compensation from your hard work.

Speak at Conferences

One great way to develop brand-name awareness about your startup is to speak at conferences and trade shows. Fortunately, you’ll find no shortage of opportunities to do that.

You’ll have to start small, of course. The larger, well-known conferences will have plenty of speakers and probably won’t have any room for a newbie such as yourself.

However, there are plenty of smaller conferences all across the country that are looking for speakers. Reach out to the organizers of those shows, brag about your bona fides, and offer them a presentation that will rock the house.

Make yourself known at conferences a few times a year and soon you’ll have clients calling you out of nowhere asking for a proposal.

Consider Specializing

When you say “Internet marketing,” you haven’t said everything. Internet marketing consists of SEO, SEM, PPC, CRO, SMM, and plenty of other acronyms related to building a brand online.

Simply put: you’re probably biting off more than you can chew if you opt to handle everything related to Internet marketing right out of the gate. That’s especially true if you’re a cash-strapped startup.

Instead, specialize in one aspect of digital marketing first. Go after clients who are only looking to improve the conversion rate on a landing page or people who need assistance with advertising on Facebook.

Then, when you’ve succeeded in that aspect of digital marketing, you can add offer another service as well. After a while, you’ll have a portfolio of services that you offer much like some of the larger shops.

Have a Social Media Presence

When you’re starting a digital marketing agency, you’ll want to be on social media. It’s free to create an account on social media platforms, so why not take advantage? You can benefit from organic lead generation, engaging with customers and potential customers, and then turn your business global.

Generating Leads

There are several ways to generate leads, but it can be difficult at first growing your client base so don’t get discouraged. Before generating leads, you’ll want to have your target customer in mind.

Once you have your target customer, one method you can use for lead generation is starting a Youtube channel.

Make sure to regularly publish video content on Youtube to generate leads with helpful content. Some publishing ideas are case studies, hot marketing topics, how to’s, and reviews from clients.

Are you noticing some articles on your blog perform better than others? Take a look at the title. Do A/B testing of different titles and see which performs better. You can always go back and switch out articles for blog posts.

Another method is to do affiliate marketing. When you partner with affiliates, you can then expand your network and find potential prospects. You can also do cold emails, but be careful with this method so you don’t come off as spam.

Properly research each company before reaching out, and craft an email that speaks to their needs. This is great when you’re first starting out and your budget is limited.

Actually you should also keep in mind that, if your agency will work on generating leads for other companies in some way, you should know how to do it. If you can market yourself, it will be easier to do it for your customers and you will have a case study in your hands about you.

Never Stop Learning

You might think that you’re pretty smart when it comes to digital marketing. After all, you’ve scored a few wins in the past. Fair enough. Now make sure that you stay smart by continually learning.

There’s probably no discipline that changes more rapidly over a short period of time that Internet marketing. That’s because it’s based on technology and technology is rapidly evolving.

If you want to succeed over the long run, you’re going to need to understand the latest and greatest strategies. Otherwise, competitors who are the best in the business will swoop in and steal your clients.

Bookmark the best websites and blogs related to digital marketing. Read them regularly. Keep learning so you can always provide your clients with outstanding customer service.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Running an Internet Marketing Company

Advantages

You won’t need a lot of money to get started, and your services should be in demand as the need for internet marketing continues to grow, so the income potential is strong.

PayScale reports that the median income for this type of specialist was $42,851 as of June 2019. These specialists typically charge anywhere from $10 to $22 an hour or more, depending on the type of services provided and skill level. Some specialists additionally earn commissions and bonuses when marketing strategies produce good results.

All work can be completed virtually. You can work from home or anywhere in the world.

Disadvantages

Like most business options, running an online marketing business has a few downsides.

Finding initial clients can be a challenge. You should be able to gain some experience through freelancing sites such as Upwork, but you probably won’t earn as much initially. Networking and joining internet groups can help considerably.

You might eventually have to hire subcontractors or employees or train interns as your business grows.

Tools and resources come and go quickly online, so you’ll have to stay abreast of all the latest online trends.

It isn’t enough to just add SEO to a client’s website. You must be able to prove your results. This means tracking data to show that your changes are resulting in increased traffic, or whatever goal you and your client have set.

Why Should You Invest in Internet Marketing?

If you’re not using internet marketing to market your business you should be. An online presence is crucial to helping potential clients and customer find your business – even if your business is small and local. (In 2017, one third of all mobile searches were local and local search was growing 50% faster than mobile searches overall.) Online is where the eyeballs are so that’s where your business needs to be.

According to the U.S. Commerce Department, consumers spent $453.46 billion on the web for retail purchases in 2017, a 16.0% increase compared with $390.99 billion in 2016. That’s the highest growth rate since 2011 when online sales grew 17.5% over 2010.

Forrester predicts that online sales will account for 17% of all US retail sales by 2022. And digital advertising is also growing strongly; According to Strategy Analytics, in 2017 digital advertising was up 12%, accounting for approximately 38% of overall spending on advertising, or $207.44 billion.

This kind of growth explains why online marketers are constantly devising new internet marketing strategies in the hopes of driving more traffic to their websites and to their offline stores and making more sales. Below are additional reasons to take advantage of internet marketing

1. Your customers are online

Internet marketing is so important because your customers are online. Considering that over 4.2 billion people are on the Internet, it’s a great opportunity for you to reach leads that are looking for your business. There are billions of people online just waiting to find your company.

People use the Internet to find all types of information. They’re constantly conducting searches to find relevant information about businesses, products, and services. By investing in Internet marketing, you’re helping your company reach those interested leads.

As a marketer, you want to reach potential customers where they live, work, shop, get information, and seek entertainment. All of this is wrapped up in one place: The Internet.

Even if you operate locally, your audience is online. That’s why organizations in the healthcare sector, like hospitals, orthopedic surgeons, and more use Internet marketing to promote their services and expand their care.

Internet marketing online is valuable to your business because it helps you connect with leads that are the most interested in your business.

2. It allows you to drive quality traffic

One of the biggest hurdles with traditional advertising is obtaining interested leads.

When you use traditional advertising, you don’t know how many valuable leads you will reach. Your advertisements appear in front of interested and uninterested leads, which makes it difficult to drive an abundance of quality traffic.

Internet marketing is important because it helps you drive more qualified traffic. You reach more leads that are interested in your business. The ability to target specific leads helps you drive traffic that takes interest in your company.

You can target leads specifically by different characteristics.

Internet marketing allows you to target by demographic information, socioeconomic status, hobbies, interests, or spending habits. You can get very precise with your targeting to ensure that you’re only reaching leads you know will be interested in your business.

Effective Internet marketing will help you reach the right leads at the right time.

3. Your competitors are doing it

If you want to remain in competition with your competitors, you must invest in Internet marketing. Your competitors are already investing in different Internet marketing methods and working to obtain new leads.

If you aren’t investing in Internet marketing, you’re falling behind your competition.

To keep up with your competitors, you must establish an effective online marketing campaign. It will help you obtain leads and prevent you from losing them to your competitors.

4. It allows you to multitask

The importance of online marketing also includes its ability to run multiple campaigns at once. The Internet makes it easy for you to take on a high level of customers and provide them with a quality experience.

You can handle millions of customers at one time when they’re on your website. Your website can take on multiple transactions, which allows you to obtain more conversions for your business. It’s a great opportunity to grow your business.

In addition, you can run multiple marketing campaigns at once. This means you can reach leads through multiple channels at the same time, maximizing your business’s reach. You’ll earn more valuable leads by investing in Internet marketing.

5. It increases your business’s visibility

When you want more people to check out your business, you must increase your business’s visibility. It can be challenging to do this through offline tactics because you don’t have much control over who sees your marketing materials.

With online marketing, you expose your business to hundreds of people.

The Internet is constantly marketing for your business. People can access your website or your social media 24/7. This means that your business is visible to your audience at all times.

In addition, you can use other digital marketing methods to reach your audience and increase your brand’s visibility. A few strategies include content marketing, social media marketing, and even video marketing.

Brand visibility means that more people are getting familiar with your business.

When people are more familiar with your business, they’re more likely to choose your business when they’re ready to convert. People choose brands they’re familiar with, so this brand exposure guides them towards choosing your business when they’re ready to convert.

How Important is Internet Marketing to Your Business

As of October 2018 almost 4.2 billion people were active internet users and 3.4 billion were social media users (Statista). China, India and the United States rank ahead all other countries in terms of internet users.

This gives a marketer an unprecedented number of customers to reach with product and service offerings, available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

The interactive nature of the internet facilitates immediate communication between businesses and consumers, allowing businesses to respond quickly to the needs of consumers and changes in the marketplace. “Everyone has the internet in their pocket all the time, and this changes everything for small businesses” (Cory Capoccia, Forbes).

Online reviews have become one of the most important components in purchasing decisions by consumers in North America. According to a survey conducted by Dimensional Research which included over 1000 participants, 90% of respondents said that positive online reviews influenced their buying decisions and 94% will use a business with at least four stars.

Interestingly, negative reviews typically came from online review sites whereas Facebook was the main source of positive reviews. Forrester Research predicts that by 2020, 42% of in-store sales will be from customers who are influenced by web product research.

Online reviews, then, have become another form of internet marketing that small businesses can’t afford to ignore. While many small businesses think that they can’t do anything about online reviews, that’s not true.

Just by actively encouraging customers to post reviews about their experience small businesses can weight online reviews positively. Sixty-eight percent of consumers left a local business review when asked. So assuming a business’s products or services are not subpar, unfair negative reviews will get buried by reviews by happier customers.

How Internet Marketing Works

The truth is that internet marketing is a legitimate lead generation strategy that, like traditional marketing, can take a lot of time, work, and experience. And, just like traditional marketing, if you’re not paying good money for it, than you’re probably not going to get the results you desire.

Let us now exploring the 3 main types of internet marketing and how you can use them to your advantage.

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is the process of making a website or web page rank higher than other websites in search engines such as Google, Yahoo, or Bing. These rankings specifically refer to the white area in the middle of the page (“organic”), not to be confused with the shaded areas at the top, right, and bottom of the page which are areas in which people pay Google for their ad to come up (we’ll discuss that next).

An SEO process can contain many different steps and strategies but all generally include some variation of “optimizing” the code and content on a website while also building high-quality links to your site. Using both of these strategies will show search engines that your site is a top resource for the content or media the searcher is looking for.

The search terms or “queries” users place into search engines are often called “keywords.” Choosing which keywords to target through SEO revolves around what the business owner or marketer believe their target potential customer will type into the search engine.

It is the job of Search Engine Optimizers (“SEO’s”) to analyze and determine which keywords will yield the greatest number of leads and then to optimize the site to target those keywords.

For instance, if I want to find a company that does digital marketing here in our company headquarters, I might type the phrase “digital marketing riverside” into Google. A different set of search results will be displayed to the searcher for each and every different keyword you type.

SEO’s will also want to complete and submit the company’s directory and maps listings for local business. The more accurate those listings are across the board, the more Google and other search engines will validate and rank a local or maps listing for the business.

This “Local SEO” tactic is key for small businesses because ranking locally on Google will allow their business website to display near the top of the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) along with their phone number, directions, and online reviews.

2. Pay-Per-Click Marketing (PPC)

Pay-Per-Click is exactly what it sounds like: You place a bid on a certain keyword that you would like your ad to display for and…if someone clicks the ad, you are charged for it.

There are actually other types of campaigns in which you can pay per impression (the number of times people see your ad) or action (“likes” or “follows”), but most people generally group all paid search marketing within the term “PPC” since it is the most common.

Running a PPC campaign can be an expensive way to generate new leads to your business, but, when done correctly, a good PPC Manager will be able to optimize your campaign based on an optimal cost per conversion and will be able to drive high quality leads to your organization. Google and Bing provide many other opportunities to run PPC campaigns.

Other types of PPC campaigns include:

Display – Graphical or text ads that are displayed on other websites
Retargeting – Ads that are served to people that have already visited your website or shopping cart previously, reminding them of your products/service or targeting a special offer to them to help increase conversions.
Social Media Ads – Promoted posts or ads on social networks like Facebook or Twitter, engaging your followers, their friends, or a specific demographic.
Product Listing Ads – Bid on listing your eCommerce store’s products within platforms like Google Shopping.

When done correctly, each of these campaigns will enable you to get your website, products, services, and/or your brand directly in front of people who are already searching for what you are offering. Pay Per Click is the best way to drive new business immediately.

3. Social Media Marketing (SMM)

Social media has exploded over the last few years. It has become the default means for distributing content and media such as blog posts, articles, videos, press, and reviews. Social media is the new word of mouth.

Social Media Marketing (“SMM”) can be a great way to engage your followers and their friends in ways you otherwise would never be able to. It also is a great way to be creative and drive interest to your brand in ways that your competitors aren’t.

Before social media, you would have to target a large audience through a medium like television to reach your target demographic. Now, you’re able to narrow your target down to age, interests, influences, buying patterns, and much more. You can also use it engage your loyal followers to be a champion of your brand, driving their friends to your site or storefront.

Unlike SEO and PPC, there is no technical guide to using SMM. Each strategy, campaign, and the network is unique to each business — however, all should be done with the intent of driving your customers or followers to perform a specific action that will be beneficial to your business.

What are the Types of Internet Marketing

1. Content Marketing

Content marketing is a marketing strategy approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract, retain and get your audience to take profitable action. With content marketing, you will be able to build relationships with potential customers and become a partner rather than an advertiser.

Content marketing is an ongoing process that focusses on communicating with consumers, it doesn’t always result in selling. For this reason, businesses should use content marketing strategies to educate the consumers while delivering valuable and reliable information to the buyers who will, in turn, reward you with their loyalty and business.

Content marketing strongly relies on content distribution. Regardless of what type of marketing you do, content marketing should be part of your strategy and not separate.

2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Most of the marketers think that after building a website with an awesome design and having created services pages for all the service they offer they will receive tons of visitors. Right?

Wrong!

It just doesn’t happen like that, you have to have the right keywords or key phrases. Search Engine Optimization is a process of optimizing websites or contents, by doing so they will show up in search engines search as Google.

Search Engines decides which website content to show for search term based on keywords mentioned on the website links that refer to the website. Enough knowledge of SEO will help one to optimize a website to maximize its chances of ranking well for relevant searches.

3. Email Marketing

Email marketing is a form of direct marketing where it involves sending commercial information about an industry brand, products or services sent to a group of people who are either prospective or already existing customers using electronic mails or emails.

Email marketing includes an opt-in email advertising, where a subscriber consents to receive messages from company websites.

It is regarded as a superpower as it offers a direct channel of communication between your business and your customers both existing and potential. You first need to acquire an email address of your customer or potential customer. While sending the emails you have to figure out a way of delivering your content without spamming them, this can be achieved by use of lead magnets.

4. Pay-per-click Advertising

Pay per click advertising is a form of internet marketing where a marketer pays for each click on a link to a website. There are different types of pay-per-click ads but paid search is the most common one.

These ads appear when people search for things on a search engine like Microsoft Bing, Google, and AdWords. It is absently a way of buying visits to your site, rather than waiting to earn them organically.

A form of PPC is the search engine advertising, where advertisers are allowed to place bids for ads placement in search engine sponsored links. So, that when someone searches for a specific keyword that is relating to your business then your ad will appear at the very top spot of google results.

5. Search Engine Marketing

Search Engine Marketing refers to paid traffic from search engines. In this internet marketing strategy, a marketer pays a predefined amount of money for showing various marketing messages at various places within the search results for specified phrases and keywords.

The most popular paid search platform used by search marketers is Google AdWords, followed by Bing Ads. Search Engine Marketing is a form of Pay-Per-Click advertising. As a form of online marketing, it targets the users of search engines, such as Yahoo, Google, and Bing.

6. Influencer Marketing

Influencer Marketing is a form of marketing that focuses on influential people rather than the targeted market as a whole. The influencer is an individual who has influence over potential customers and also orient market activities rotate around these individuals.

With the emergence of IM, brands are offered a potential to unify their marketing, PR, sales, products, social media, and digital marketing. All of these is through a powerful and relevant relationship-based communication. ROI and marketing potential of influencer marketing is great.

Within a market, they exist influential people who have can cause a change in the tide of consumers opinions. They can be easily recognized by their hundreds of thousands of followers, the followers are you targeted audience at the end of it all. An influencer can be a popular fashion photographer on Instagram, a famous celebrity who tweets a lot or even a successful sportsman.

An influencer is not just a person with a larger audience who you can pay to say good things about you. No! they are people who have spent a lot of their time to build their own brand and cultivating their audience. These individuals are usually protective of their reputation and the people who trust them.

7. Paid Advertising

Paid advertising is a type of internet marketing where advertisers pay to show their adverts on search engines and online platforms such as social media channels including YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook.

Some common types of paid advertisements include pay-per-click, pay-per-impression and display ads. Although paid advertising is an expensive form of advertising compared to earned advertising, it is the best way to effectively expose your company’s brand, products, services to a large audience.

8. Social Media Marketing (SMM)

With the existence of so many social media sites, Social Media Marketing has been able to be adopted more easily by marketers. Social Media Marketing involves a process of acquiring attention and also sales through a social media platform such as Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.

Through social media marketing business marketers will be able to fulfill their objectives in terms of improving customer services, building brand equality, collecting customers feedback and reaching new customers. To connect with customers in a profitable way, then companies should adopt social media marketing which provides value to others.

But be careful, to be successful in social media marketing then you have to fully understand the way the social media network you want to use works. Some social media platforms can work on your advantage while others may not.

Final Thoughts

A lot of people are spending their time and money being online, you can reach them easily if you have a strong internet connection and just a laptop or smartphone. Why don’t you start embracing internet marketing service to start making huge profits? For marketers, this is a golden opportunity which they cannot let it go, a chance to be seized. We are in a technological era so, it doesn’t hurt to change a little for the better.

Internet marketing is a kind of marketing that keeps on changing and constantly evolving. As an online marketer, you should focus on the areas of your natural strengths and you need to do your best to standout at those things you are skilled at. In other terms, you should choose the right internet marketing strategies.