Internet Marketing Scope and Career Options

By definition, Internet marketing is the provision and promotion of products and services online. It merges the creative and technical aspects of marketing – design, development, advertising and sales. Since the advent of the Internet and search engines, Internet usage has steadily and rapidly increased since the 90s. The average number of searches per day has skyrocketed from 9,800 in 1998 to well over four billion in 2012.That adds up to over one trillion searches per year on Google alone!

Not only are people performing informational queries, but searches for products and services as well. This means that the majority of people find out about the products and businesses they buy and do business with through the Internet. However, search engine users usually only pay attention to the first page of search results – usually the top few results. Considering that more and more business is conducted online every year, it means that competition for these positions has grown and that they have major value to savvy business owners. It has come to the point where competition in local, national or international markets requires a strong online presence. Gaining and maintaining a position on the first page of SERPs (search engine results pages) influence users to trust the credibility, expertise and reputability of your company.
Internet marketing is made up of several different strategies including SEO (search engine optimization), PPC (pay-per-click), ecommerce, social media optimization, social bookmarking, affiliate marketing and online public relations – just to name a few. Each of these strategies, when implemented effectively, work in tandem to boost website visibility with the ultimate goal of increasing conversions. A conversion is the action you want a visitor to your website to take – a purchase, a phone call, a download, subscription, donation, form completion and so forth. It is whatever action-based goal you have created for your website.

How it work

It also combines the technical and creative aspects of the World Wide Web such as advertising, designing, development and sales. Moreover, Internet Marketing also deals with creating and placing ads throughout the various stages of customer engagement cycle.

Online marketing is divided into different types:

Affiliate Marketing:

It is a marketing practice wherein a business pays an online retailer, e-commerce site or blog for each visitor or sales that these websites make for their brand.

Display Advertising:

This refers to advertisement banners that are displayed on other websites or blogs to boost traffic for their own content. This, in turn, can increase product awareness.

Email Marketing:

From the name itself, this is a marketing process that involves reaching out to your customers via email.

Inbound Marketing:

This type of Internet marketing involves sharing of free valuable content to your target market to convince them to become your loyal customer. This could be done by setting up a business blog.

Search Engine Marketing:

This is a form of marketing that promotes a business through paid advertisement that appears on search engine result pages. This includes paid placement, contextual advertising, paid inclusion or through search engine optimization.

Search Engine Optimization:

Contrary to SEM, SEO uses the unpaid and natural process of promoting content on SERPs. This includes keyword research and placement, link building and social media marketing.

Social Media Marketing:

Based on its name, social media marketing is the process of promoting a website through various social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest and more.

The Internet has the power to connect millions of people from around the world. Thus, it also has the capabilities to bring your business to millions of your target market worldwide. What makes this process a best inclusion to your promotional effort is the fact that you don’t need to shell out plenty of money.

In addition, the effectiveness of your campaign can be easily measured using web analytics and cost-volume-profit analysis tools. However, it requires you to learn the many facets of Internet marketing so that you’ll know whether your efforts are giving the return on investment that you want for your business.

Because of the rapid increase in the use of the internet to find all kinds of products, services, organizations and tools, a marketing strategy cantered around the internet is the modern way to advertise and promote what you have to offer. Internet marketing is also the best form of marketing because it actually offers a way to track and analyze data. This means that strategies can be created, tested, revised, retested and refined so that your website is optimized to generate as many conversions as possible.