What is online marketing? How to build an effective strategy

Internet use is now almost universal, and businesses are shifting from traditional marketing to online marketing. But do you really know what Marketing Online is, and what it takes to run an effective online marketing campaign? The following article Mona Media will answer all of these questions.

What is online marketing?

Online marketing, also called internet marketing, is the term for the activities Marketing (online promotion) that brands or businesses carry out on the internet. By running an online marketing strategy, a business uses the internet to spread messages about its products, brand and services to readers and other potential customers through various this distribution channel. Readers can hear, watch or read in many forms while searching, comparing, shopping or interacting online.

Pros and cons of online marketing

Advantages of online marketing

Online marketing reaches many potential customers

More and more people everywhere get access to the internet, and the number keeps growing (one statistic puts it at about 64%). That coverage gives businesses a chance to reach millions of customers at the same time, with no limit of time or distance.

With just a computer connected to the internet or a smartphone, people can find information anywhere. Your ads can therefore reach people in any country. A business can market its products and services effectively from a single desk.

Keeps your business running 24/7

Traditional stores are limited by opening hours and distance, while online marketing removes those limits. With a Website, customers can browse and order at any time, from anywhere, and pay online in a few clicks. Online shopping has become a necessity, convenient for both buyer and seller.

A website with smart features such as live chat lets advisers answer customer questions immediately, so every customer feels looked after. Features like scheduled posts, scheduled ads and automated replies also keep marketing running continuously. Customers can visit the website to look for products whenever they want. That extends your operating hours and creates a chance to grow revenue and profit.

Connects you with customers in real time

With online marketing, businesses and customers can check product status in real time. The system updates remaining stock automatically when an order is placed, which makes shopping smoother. Order details are emailed after purchase, so businesses can easily track each order. Online marketing also lets you run strong campaigns on the internet, with announcements about sales, thank-you gifts and more.

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Saves cost and time

Traditional marketing is very costly, and content takes a lot of time to prepare and revise. Online marketing lets a startup launch products and services on a small budget while still reaching a wide audience. It allows automation, a choice of ad placements and flexible timing, so ads cost less while getting the best results. If a business also has a strong social media account or a professional website with a large audience, it can cut ad costs further.

Keeps you responsive to your customers

Online marketing lets customers learn about your products and services directly through comments on the website, or message you quickly on Zalo, Facebook and more. This speeds up their buying decision and helps ads, products and services spread fast among their friends and family. A business can also quickly edit an ad that is not working or not a good fit, to arrive at the best version for its target customers.

Helps grow revenue

The ultimate goal of marketing is to drive sales and grow revenue. For each product, online marketing studies customers closely in order to run ad campaigns that fit, along with offers, discounts and other incentives. This process helps sell more and can lift a business's revenue sharply in a short time.

Makes results easy to measure

A single Facebook account is enough for a business to collect details such as address, email and name, which opens different ways to reach potential customers and improves communication. This ability to analyze and collect data gives businesses a broader view for making specific plans that serve each customer segment. With user data, you can find ways to increase reach and engagement and improve marketing results, and turn more visitors cao.

->See more: What is marketing automation? 4 steps to build a marketing automation strategy

Disadvantages of online marketing

Besides the big advantages above, online marketing also has some drawbacks:

Online marketing gets diluted

Online marketing is convenient and easy to run on the internet, so competition among rivals is intense. Ad performance can also drop because customers see ads constantly. They may scroll past without paying attention to the message you send.

People are drawn to hot news and big events, basically anything without an ad. This fierce competition forces you to keep innovating, producing creative, high-quality, engaging content that meets customers' information needs.

Online marketing spreads very fast

If a business does not manage information well, online marketing is a double-edged sword that can damage the brand. Because everything is instant and spreads so quickly online, a brand image can collapse easily.

Online marketing depends on electronic devices

Online marketing only reaches target customers who browse the internet, so it is limited for people without electronic devices. An unstable network, a broken web server or slow page loading can also keep customers from opening your site, or make them wait so long that they leave. On top of that, ad settings may not be tuned for every device, so ads can be hard to see or images can look distorted, which hurts ad results.

Security and privacy concerns

With weak security, customer data in online marketing can be stolen and sold to competitors. Automatically placing ads on spam-heavy websites can clog the network and seriously harm online marketing. A real example: in September 2018 Facebook was hit by hackers and around 50 million accounts were compromised. Large websites were affected as accounts were hacked, and Facebook users received many unwanted ads…

Technology changes too fast

Technology develops and changes at a dizzying pace, so businesses selling online must keep changing to keep up. Internet users look for modern, convenient services and want the latest experience. If you do not update your marketing methods in time as technology moves, you will certainly fall behind.

Open to abuse by bad actors

The internet is a flat world that serves business well. But it is also open to anyone, which makes it easy for bad actors to exploit it for profit and damage a business's reputation and brand. Large numbers of fanpages, websites and social accounts are set up to sell counterfeit goods. When a business account is impersonated, it is hard to control and causes real difficulty and loss.

Online marketing tools

There are many tools for online marketing. The most common are:

Website Marketing

A website is not only the face of a business but also the most effective and essential online marketing tool for long-term growth. Investing in a professional site with full information on the company, products and services, and a way to receive customer feedback, is a priority for any business. A website contributes strongly to brand awareness. A good-looking, useful site with complete content and clear information makes customers trust you and feel safe buying, which lifts sales.

Social Marketing

Social marketing is a favorite tool, used by huge numbers of people on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube and more. Businesses should use these platforms to post images and information about their products and services and follow new trends, so customers can find information and engage more easily. Running an online marketing campaign on social platforms is a strong strategy for any business.

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SEM (Search Engine Marketing)

SEM works in two forms: Adwords (buying advertising keywords) and SEO (search engine optimization). This tool is very useful for increasing traffic and the number of searches for content on your site, giving it steady, long-lasting traffic.

Viral Marketing

Viral marketing supports online marketing by creating activities, programs or community links through forums and social networks to introduce products, information and services to users as quickly as possible. It spreads fast once users take an interest in the business's products.

Email Marketing

Email Marketing uses email to promote and introduce services or products to target customers. To do email marketing, a business needs a certain set of email addresses. It is a personal form of marketing, but no business can do without it. The most common types of email marketing are:

• Welcome emails: thank new sign-ups, answer their questions after they register on the website, and explain how to update their details
• Sales emails: introduce promotions
• Transactional emails: order status, electronic receipts…
• Newsletter emails: creative, engaging content

Mobile Marketing

Mobile marketing is an advertising tool that uses a call center to send bulk messages, or short codes combined with games to spark the curiosity of customers interested in your product. Sometimes Mobile Marketing can also be ignored by recipients, who are wary of scams.

Hùng sees many small business owners who work hard and care about their customers but lack a clear way to bring in new ones. This video will help you see it. Watch to learn the 7 ways to find customers that MONA has actually used.

Online marketing in an era of global integration

Economic integration between countries has opened up the exchange of goods. You no longer have to travel abroad to buy goods made there.

On top of that, advances in information technology have contributed hugely to trade in domestic and foreign goods. In the early days of information technology, people paid little attention to marketing. Today, it is a different story. Whether an individual or a company, any business needs online marketing, like the saying “fish need water to live”.

Every business has its own way of marketing online, so each reaches customers differently and, of course, gets different results. So how many ways of marketing online do you know?

What is the difference between online marketing and digital marketing?

Online marketing and Digital Marketing exist side by side and share many similarities. Both use digital channels, meaning devices and platforms, to build, promote and deliver a business's message to users. That is why many people confuse the two. However, there are clear differences between them.

Difference in measuring results

Digital marketing results can be measured, but not easily, since this depends not only on the website and the internet but also on the time spent collecting data and compiling figures. A business can hardly know how many people read an SMS. Online marketing is easier, thanks to useful tools such as Google Analytics. You can see exactly how much traffic you get, how long users stay on the website, whether customers want to buy…

Difference in how they operate

Online marketing needs an internet connection, but digital marketing can run on some electronic devices without one. Its advertising channels rely on different telecom infrastructure such as radio, mobile and television signals, so the forms of marketing are more varied.

Difference in purpose

Both online marketing and digital marketing can raise conversions and brand awareness, but digital marketing is the broader concept. If your marketing strategy aims to reach target customers beyond the internet, digital marketing is the better fit.

How does online marketing work?

The goal of online marketing is the same as most other kinds of marketing and advertising: attract customers and hold their attention. Once customers know you, they will like you and trust you. This formula, applied over time, turns potential customers into buyers. Online marketing takes place entirely in a virtual world rather than a physical one.

Effective online marketing methods today

Today, businesses can apply many online marketing methods with outstanding results, typically the following:

SEO Website

What does doing SEO involve?? Website SEO in online marketing is the process of optimizing the whole site to Google's standards and other necessary factors, to raise the site's credibility and quality. It also improves the user experience when shopping on the website. Two factors affect overall website SEO: on-page SEO and off-page SEO.

SEO Onpage

Optimizing on-page elements such as content, meta, images and headings to raise your site's ranking in search engines. SEO Onpage is the work of optimizing a website or its on-page content to rank higher on Google for your keywordsand other target phrases.

SEO Offpage

SEO Offpage aims to increase the number of reputable links from other websites by optimizing link building or social media channels… The more websites link to yours, the more Google judges your content to be valuable and relevant. The trustworthiness of the linking sites also affects whether your site reaches the top of search results.

->See more: Steps to e-commerce SEO get to the top effectively

Content Marketing

Content marketing is really the stories told on your website, through plenty of formats such as:

• Blog posts
• Ebook
• Email
• Videos shared on Facebook and YouTube
• Industry reports and studies
• Infographics summarizing reports and studies
• Podcast
• Case studies
• Seminars

Good, valuable content attracts readers and raises conversion rates, which brings a business organic traffic while saving as much as possible on advertising spend.

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing attracts customers through social channels such as YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter… to sell products. Businesses use it to reach new groups of potential customers. A marketing strategy Marketing through social media comes in two types: paid and free.

Free social media marketing

Free social media marketing aims to build a community with a close relationship with users, creating interest and loyalty among customers. To make users aware of your reputation, you need to post quality content regularly and give users plenty of value to hold their attention. Show customers your professionalism through ready support and service, and quick replies to comments on the company's social pages. Show that you care about and value customers, and make good use of your connection with consumers.

Paid social media marketing

Paid media marketing means paid PR: you spend money to reach customers on a larger scale. It comes with social media ads, Facebook ads, mobile ads and so on.

Affliate Marketing

Affliate Marketing is an online business model similar to a collaborator program. You can approach large or small distributors that run an affiliate program, register and promote their products, and earn commission under the distributor's policy.

Email Marketing

Email marketing uses email to market directly to users, to find new customers and keep existing ones. It delivers a return on investment up to 4 times higher than other forms of online marketing. You nurture subscribers with discounts, gifts, early access to new products and more. Use email to drive sales by creating subscriber groups based on personal interests, then set up automated email campaigns to send to each customer segment.

Paid Advertising

One of the most effective online marketing methods today is paid advertising. Advertisers pay to show ads on search engines and on many online platforms such as Zalo, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram. In other words, advertisers pay for each click on their ads.

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How to build an online marketing strategy for your business

Market research

Before building an online marketing strategy, a business needs to research and analyze its business environment thoroughly. Market Research in depth: competitors, the industry environment, the market, the company itself, suppliers and more, to get the broadest view of the field. Researching and analyzing the market and competitors gives the business the most objective assessment, a yardstick for planning the most feasible strategy.

Analyze your target customers

Analyzing your target customers is one of the most important steps in building an online marketing strategy. A business needs to understand its customers' needs, characteristics, wishes and difficulties in order to choose the right solutions and direction. Target customers are the best source of revenue for a business.

Once a business focuses on the right customer group and does not drift, revenue results will certainly improve. You need to understand customer psychology and wishes as you reach them, optimize your marketing, and deliver personalized marketing content that fits the right Customer Insight so it is easier to persuade customers, which raises conversion rates and optimizes profit.

Set goals for your online marketing strategy

Each ad campaign has specific goals such as:

• Informational goal: Spread information about services, products, events and more to target customers. This goal is mainly used when advertising a new product.
• Persuasion goal: Aims to persuade and draw customers into buying a product or service, or to get them to think the way the advertised content suggests.
• Reminder goal: Plants specific content in customers' memory, such as the business name, a place or a product brand.
• Competitor comparison goal: Compares the benefits and uses of your product with those of competitors' products.

Position your services and products

Positioning your services and products means designing your brand identity and your products so that the market understands and values your business, raising your competitiveness against others in the same field.

Craft the advertising message

The advertising message is the core of building an online marketing strategy. Even a large-scale online marketing strategy will fail completely if the core message is a poor fit, sloppy or hard to follow. The message must follow the purpose of the ad. For example, an informational ad should focus on the brand, use and look of the product, while a persuasive ad focuses on its benefits. A good message is short, concise, memorable and meaningful, and leaves an impression on whoever receives it.

Choose your media channels

Building and promoting a brand requires effective media channels. In online marketing, content is the core, but creating it is not simple. So you need a channel that truly delivers, to spread your message. It could be search marketing such as SEO and PPC; marketing on product and service review sites; email marketing, where you design the message and evaluate results; or social marketing through blogs, a Facebook fanpage and more. Depending on your target customers, choose one or several channels that suit you.

Track and measure marketing performance

Tracking the results of your marketing strategy means tracking business results, purchase rates, website traffic and so on, so you can adjust the numbers effectively. You also need to follow customer feedback on social networks to learn what customers want and how they respond to your product, so you can find a fix quickly.

Mistakes to avoid when running online marketing

No specific plan

Setting up and building a plan is a key condition for an online marketing campaign. If your business runs an online marketing campaign without a specific plan, you will spend a lot of time and money for very little return. A good plan combines a long-term vision with short-term steps, so you make the right decisions along the way.

Not choosing the right partner and format

There are now many marketing channels and tools, so digital marketing tactics are very varied and keep changing. If a business goes it alone, with no partnerships at all, and runs its online marketing campaign by itself, results will not be high. Every business should find a companion to build the most effective marketing strategy together.

Not evaluating and measuring regularly

As noted above, regular measurement is the basis for adjusting your strategy sensibly and setting the right direction in each situation, to ensure KPI. Ignoring measurement results is a serious mistake many businesses make. Many pour time and money into different online marketing channels without measuring results or watching their return on investment ROI. As a result, they cannot judge how effective a campaign is. Investing blindly in online marketing is a poor approach, like gambling on luck.

In addition, many companies measure online marketing results inaccurately or ineffectively. They only look at traffic and site visits without a deeper look at each specific customer segment. They also have not worked out how many customers each online marketing activity brings in, so it is hard to decide the next step for their business.

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Frequently asked questions about online marketing

Can you teach yourself online marketing?

Today, the reach of the internet and social networks lets learners find any information they need, so teaching yourself online marketing is easy. You can learn from books, online documents, videos on YouTube, and groups and seminars where you pick up new knowledge conveniently. Or you can study at home with online marketing courses. Spend a little time researching and buy a quality online course, and you can learn everything you want, from basic to advanced.

What jobs can you get after studying online marketing?

Today, online marketing is a vital campaign type on online business platforms, and every industry aims for it. Qualified people are therefore in constant demand from businesses. After graduating, students of online marketing can work in many fields with attractive salaries:

• Specialist in the marketing, advertising or communications departments of domestic and foreign companies
• Analyst who sets up marketing research plans
• Manager of marketing and communications departments in companies, private businesses, event companies and more
• Owner of an advertising business, advertising agency or event organizer
• Teaching and research at universities and economics institutes
• Senior roles such as department head, executive director or branch director

Should a business do online marketing in-house or outsource?

Building a professional online marketing team is not easy for a business, especially a small or medium one. That is why they often choose outsourced online marketing services. Professional in-house marketing, on the other hand, is an essential department for large companies.

In practice, strong companies often do both: they train and build their own marketing team and also hire an outside marketing partner. The reason is that the in-house team provides direction for the agency, while agencies bring fresh, creative ways to carry out the marketing. When both work together and support each other, the business will soon reach its growth goals.

From this article, Mona Media hopes you now understand what Marketing Online is and how to build an online marketing strategy for your products and services. Be sure to visit Mona.Media regularly for more useful articles on digital marketing and SEO knowledge.

If you need professional website design or a full-scope SEO strategy but have not found a reliable partner to carry it out, Mona Media is ready to help, with more than 10 years of experience in SEO and website design. MONA is a leading agency in Vietnam and has completed more 300+ projects and served more 10,000 clients. Take a look at Mona Media's SEO services below.