The internet emerged as a gift for marketers which provide them a very efficient way for selling their products and services. Internet marketing can also be pronounced as internet based marketing or electronic marketing/e-marketing. It can be defined as using the internet and other related electronic technologies to achieve marketing objectives and support the modern marketing concepts. Digital technologies can comprise of wireless mobile media, cable and satellite. Practically, internet marketing use company’s website along with different promotional techniques like search engines, emails, banner advertisements, links or services from other websites for attracting new customers and for providing better services to their existing customers. This helps in maintaining good customer relationship.Internet contributes brings a new revolution in the field of business. It provides various modern techniques for achieving marketing objectives and providing a well settled business to marketers. Marketing mainly has the following objectives:
1.Identifying the needs of the customers.
2.Anticipating the customer’s needs.
3.Customer satisfaction.
Internet technology has supported all these objectives by providing better services over traditional concepts of marketing, and by providing quick service to the customers. But there can be various kinds of challenges due to which marketers experience the downfall in their business. These challenges occur due to the following reasons:
1. By providing wrong information about the business.
2. Putting focus on products, production, selling, and technology rather than focusing on customer needs and better marketing opportunities.
3. Lack of prudence in case of strategic thinking.
4. Lack of good and visionary CEO.
5. Giving less importance to marketing behind finance, production and technology.
6. Lack of innovation and creativity. Replacement of existing product/service lines can destroy the existing position of business in the market.
If internet marketing is to become fully established and integrated as a strategic management tool, it is mandatory to shift focus towards understanding the broader applications provided by internet in marketing rather than just using it as a tool for communication and selling products. It is much more than that, you just need to explore it and do its proper study. The internet marketing process comprises of seven stages and these stages are described as:
1.Framing market opportunities
2.Formulation of the marketing strategy
3.Designing the customer experience
4.Crafting the customer interface
5.Designing the marketing program
6.Leveraging customer information through technology
7.Evaluating the marketing program
One can modify these stages according to their needs because every business has different goals and objects, although all of them focus on profitability. Previously we had discussed that the internet has changed the whole process of marketing with support of various amazing digital technologies. Now the next question that comes to the mind is that how these technologies become a boon for internet marketing? Among all digital techniques search engines plays a very important role in online marketing.
These days search engine optimization (SEO) techniques are used for increasing traffic on websites. It is the process of improving your website’s position in the results of search engine query for target set of keywords. Therefore SEO and internet marketing are interlinked to each other. It is mandatory to have a highly qualified SEO team for achieving objectives of online marketing. There are various institutes as well as online forums which offer online SEO training. It focuses on various aspects of SEO. They provide different crash courses and full time courses as well, all at very affordable prices.
So, proper team management and utilization of online resources is the key to success for internet marketing.
