By Nick Suino - SEO Ann Arbor

Marketing on the internet is often called web marketing, online marketing, webvertising, or e-marketing. Promoting your product, service, or company on the internet is web marketing, and this usually includes not only websites and social media, but also email campaigns and other wireless media. Some web marketing companies can also assist you with obtaining and managing digital customer data.

A good web marketing or internet marketing company can bring together the creative and technical sides of presenting your image on the Internet, providing solutions for designing and building websites, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), market analysis, and client targeting. Some of the forms of customer engagement involve the placement of your message in many different virtual locations, including banner ads, email, mobile advertising, and physical ads with ties to mobile or internet such as QR codes.

Web marketing can be loosely divided into these categories:

• Display advertising: banner ads on third-party websites or blogs to lead viewers to your website.
• Search engine marketing (SEM): promoting your website by increasing its visibility in search engine results either by paying for placement or by optimizing your site for the search engines.
• Search engine optimization (SEO): improving the visibility of your website or web page by boosting its “organic” search results.
• Social media marketing: getting you traffic or visibility by using social media websites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
• Email marketing: marketing to a group of people using email.
• Referral marketing: promoting your product or service through word or mouth.
• Affiliate marketing: your business rewards its affiliates for each visitor or customer sent to you through their website.
• Inbound marketing: creating and sharing content to bring viewers to your website or business.

Advantages and Limitations of Internet or Web Marketing

The ROMI (Return on Marketing Investment) can be substantially higher than older, traditional forms of advertising. You can reach a much wider audience for a tiny fraction of “old media” such as magazine ads, billboards, or television commercials. Buying on the internet can be much more convenient for the customer than traveling to your location. Because you can often get quick results for a new product or service, and get detailed measurements of who is visiting your site (and where they came from), marketing on the web allows you to adjust your advertising on the fly to account for consumer preferences.

Limitations

There are many products and services offered on the internet (sometimes called “the interweb” by techies) that turn out to be scams. Because it is easy to create a website, there may be a lower barrier to entry, so some unscrupulous business people target unwary consumers. This seems particularly true for websites offering “get rich quick” schemes or systems purported to help you make money on the internet itself. Be sure you look for reviews or check with your friends before you buy from an unknown business.

What Should you Look for When You Consider Marketing on the Web?

First, do your research and find a company you can trust. We’ve heard many stories from small businesses who have either hired a web marketing company overseas or else hired their sister-in-law or a college student to build their website and “market” them on the internet. Make sure your company is a professional one and that they have the knowledge needed to properly build you a website and promote it.

Many of our clients like the fact that we’re located in Ann Arbor, Michigan. We serve all of Southeastern Michigan, and our clients say they like being able to pick up the phone and call us, or ask for a meeting and sit across the desk from us to talk about their marketing goals. As long as our business relationship with you continues, we NEVER give up on trying to get your website featured prominently in the search engines and making sure you get conversions (people contacting you to purchase your products or services).

We’d love to discuss your web marketing goals. Feel free to give us a call to talk about what you’d like to achieve for your business. We’ll even take a quick look at your website and share our impressions without charging you anything. Even if you don't end up hiring us to do your web marketing for you, we like to think we can help educate and inform you. If your website is not on Page One of Google, contact us today!