The Importance of Online Marketing

As the world continues to become technology orientated the need for businesses to understand the advances in technology is crucial if they want to succeed in the business world. The phenomenon of social networking is greater than ever before with Facebook and Twitter having an outstanding number of members. It can be said that marketing departments are the ones faced with the biggest changes when marketing their company as mass media channels are no longer as effective as in previous times.

Social media is an exceptional tool for marketers in today’s business world, Facebook has over 500 million active users and twitter has around 65 million tweets posted per day. Companies are able to market their company, brand and products on this growing platform by creating their own Facebook page and Twitter account, through which a company can interact with customers on a personal basis. By doing so it will lead to increased customer loyalty and with customer loyalty comes repeat purchasing and an increase in spending per transaction. Through social media companies can effectively segment their market as they have a better understanding of consumers Geographic’s, demographics, psychographic and behavioural characteristics, specific deals can be offered to segments which are specifically suited to their characteristics and recent activities. If customers are satisfied with the service they receive from a company it will progress to loyalty.

It is important for companies to retain customers as in general 80% of a company’s revenue comes from 20% of their customers and 80% of the companies time should be spent on 20% of their customers. Through social media monitoring companies can continuously interact with customers without appearing robotic and providing them with optimum personalisation which customers respond well too.

As well as using the internet for creating and building relationships with customers it can also be used for the essential part of a company’s marketing campaign, creating awareness which is essential for a company’s survival. Awareness online can be achieved through search engine optimisation (SEO) this determines where a company ranks on the organic result pages of search engines, the optimum goal being to appear on page one of the results. The majority of users won’t look past the first page of results when searching for a specific item. SEO is achieved by having a strong title tag, Meta description, content, contextual links, domain name and videos and alt tags also improve a company’s SEO. Awareness can also be created online through pay per click advertising where a company has an add displayed on the right hand side of a results page. A company’s add appears for certain key words that have been searched and they are only charged when the add is clicked on. In addition awareness can also be created through advertising on social media sites.