Spread The Word Through Internet Marketing – Small Business Marketing 101

This series includes:

Small Business Marketing 101
Step 1: Position and Plan
Step 2: Create an Identity
Step 3: Spread the word through Internet Marketing
Step 3: Spread the word through Internet Marketing
Step 5: Measure your Social Media ROI

Our small business marketing series has informed you about understanding and positioning your brand to your core target market. We followed up with an in-depth understanding of your branding efforts, and the most critical points to take into consideration.

Let’s start with the basics. Internet marketing is also known as digital marketing, web marketing, online marketing, search marketing, and/or e-marketing. It is the general promotion of products and/or services on the Internet. It is a broad term that encompasses more than just Internet based marketing. It also includes both e-mail marketing methods and wireless media (mobile marketing, etc).

You have to start with a blue-print of your business. This is likely going to take time, so please allow yourself at least 45 minutes (given that you have all the data on hand, otherwise this will take longer) to formulate a direction for your business. Let’s get started!

There are several ways for you to market your business. As you read through the list, do not be concerned with the fact that you may not have an understanding of it. Simply, consider it as an avenue of strategy. Should you feel this may create an impact for your business, go deeper into your understanding. Without further a-do here is the list of Internet marketing avenues:

Search Marketing

Search engine marketing, (SEM), is a form of Internet marketing that promotes a brands website by increasing visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs) through the use of the following: paid placement, contextual advertising, and paid inclusion.

This can be done through various avenues such as Google Adwords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and Microsoft adCenter. Each one of these will allow for marketability on the top search engines, Google, Bing, and Yahoo!.

Our agency Creative Intellects, provides the following warning to our clients: Search Marketing, is basically bidding on a position for rankings, and depending on the advertisements click-through rate, you will be awarded higher rankings for lower bids. It is a science, and a part of this concept is a gamble. We have heard many stories of organizations that have used up much of their funds as they were either misguided or did not take careful measures to avoid such matters. Start with a small ancillary budget, and learn to utilize the tools that are the most effective, and only move forward once you have fully tested your campaign.

Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines through “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results. An Internet marketing strategy carefully crafts SEO as an essential component to any successful traffic generation program.

To give you insight, SEO involves two basic components. The first is on-page optimization (40%) which is keyword relevance within the HTML and body content. These elements include, Title Tags, Alt tags within images, Headlines, paragraphs, and meta data. The second is the off-page optimization (60%), which is the process of achieving back-links with anchor text pointing to your domain. Through both of these processes, SEO can help you to naturally increase organic search listings on major search engines.

Our agency Creative Intellects, provides the following warning to clients: SEO is not necessarily an appropriate strategy for every website, and other Internet marketing strategies can be far more effective, depending on the brands goals. This includes paid search advertising, which has its own version of SEO called ATO (Ad Text Optimization). A successful Internet marketing campaign may drive organic traffic, that is achieved through optimization techniques and not paid advertising, to web pages. It may also involve the use of the following: paid advertising on search engines and other pages, building high quality web pages to engage and persuade your audience, addressing technical issues that may keep search engines from crawling and indexing those sites, setting up analytics programs to enable site owners to measure their success, and improving a website’s conversion rate. SEO may generate a return on investment. However, search engines are not paid for organic search traffic, their algorithms change, and there are no guarantees of continued referrals.

Social Media

Social media optimization, or SMO, is a form of social media activity with the intent of attracting unique visitors to website content. Social media provides features that allow you to syndicate content, including, RSS feeds, social news and sharing buttons, user ratings and polling tools, and incorporating third-party community functionalities like images and videos. Promotional activities through social media include: blogging, commenting on other blogs, participating within discussion groups, and posting status updates on social networking profiles. SMO’s primary focus is to drive traffic from sources other than search engines, while also improving your natural search rankings.

Social media marketing programs usually center on efforts to create content that attracts attention and encourages readers to share it with their social networks. A corporate message spreads from user to user and presumably because it is coming from a trusted, third-party source, as opposed to the brand or company itself.

Mobile Marketing

Mobile marketing is can be defined as the use of any mobile medium where communication of a message occurs. This can be syndicated through numerous avenues such as: text message marketing, mobile applications, mobile enabled websites, and mobile applications embedded with advertising (to name a few).

These various types of mediums, allow for advertisers to achieve unique engagements with their select market based on specialized interests. For example, a game that incorporates car racing may have suitable advertisers within the automotive industry and/or other psycho-graphics associated products/services. Mobile marketing is changing at a very rapid pace, which means that brands can communicate with their market quickly, and that is far more effective than e-mail marketing.

With the aforementioned, Internet Marketing is a crucial science of finely crafted strategy that utilizes each medium in a creative and meaningful form. These verticals: Search Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Online Media, Social Media, and Mobile Marketing are mere examples to help you to get onto the right track of understanding what is suitable for your brand. Be sure to utilize each platform in a cohesive manner and decide where your efforts should be placed.

Stay tuned as we are going to be giving you Step 4 of this series in Small Business Marketing 101. If we can help national brands with their marketing strategies, who says that our agency cannot help you? All you have to do is take notes, and if you really want to be a step ahead, make a small investment in our eBook. Both of these tools and resources will serve as the perfect guide in establishing your mark.

Happy Marketing!