Every year, online sales volumes are growing rapidly, opening up many opportunities for companies around the world to earn money and develop. Today, the share of purchases made via the Internet is about 21%, and experts predict that by 2040 this figure will increase to 95%.
The internet has long ceased to be just an additional means of communication between people. Today, it is the core of the digital ecosystem of any modern business. Users increasingly prefer to shop online, so this is where you need to look for your future customers.
Traditional advertising is gradually losing its effectiveness, as people are tired of it and no longer trust it. Online marketing offers a relatively new way to tell the world about your product, build trust with your audience, and turn them into loyal customers.
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Ukraine is also keeping pace with global trends. The number of online stores and marketplaces in the country is steadily increasing, leading to increased competition between brands and manufacturers. As a result, there is a growing demand for specialists and agencies in internet marketing.
What is internet marketing?
Internet marketing is a comprehensive approach to promoting goods, services, and brands in the online environment with the aim of attracting potential customers, increasing traffic, and growing profits. It covers a wide range of tools adapted to the specifics of the digital space.
Unlike traditional forms of marketing, online advertising is much cheaper, which allows companies of any size to grow their business. Thanks to the accurate metrics and analytics available in the digital environment, you can now optimize your marketing campaigns, predict their results, and calculate your return on investment. This significantly reduces costs compared to offline promotion methods.
At the same time, the definition of internet marketing implies more than just traditional digital advertising. Of course, this concept is based on SEO, contextual advertising, and email newsletters. But today, online promotion is impossible to imagine without social networks, video content, blogs, chatbots, and other tools.
How does internet marketing work?
The principle of internet marketing involves consistently guiding users through the sales funnel. The first step is to attract potential customers who are already interested in your products or services. This is achieved by optimizing your website for search engines, using contextual advertising, maintaining accounts on popular social networks, email newsletters, and other tools.
Once visitors arrive at your company’s website, it is important to engage them and make them understand that your offer is relevant to them. To do this, use sales copy, attractive visual content, convenient website navigation, and online consultants.
The next step is to encourage visitors to take a specific action: buy a product, submit a request, or subscribe to a newsletter. To increase conversion rates, promotions and special offers, limited-time discounts, free shipping, and money-back guarantees are used.
At the same time, internet marketing works not only to attract new customers, but also to retain existing ones. The tools used here are loyalty programs, personalized email newsletters and push notifications, and retargeting.
At each stage, it is important to track the effectiveness of internet marketing through web analytics systems, A/B testing, and end-to-end analytics. This allows you to understand which tools work best and optimize your campaigns.
What tasks does internet marketing perform?
The main task of online marketing is to build effective communication with potential and existing customers in order to achieve specific business goals.
This could be an increase in sales, entering new markets, improving brand awareness, or increasing customer loyalty. A well-designed online strategy allows you to achieve measurable results in any area.
At the same time, there can be many goals for internet marketing. Internet promotion is also suitable for:
Increased visibility. Online channels allow you to quickly find your audience, especially for new market players. After that, you can work with the audience you have gathered, receiving high-quality traffic from a wide variety of sources.
Generating demand for a product. Through educational content and demonstrating the value of an offer, marketers create a desire and need in people to purchase a product or service.
Attracting high-quality traffic to the website. The more visitors come to the company’s web platform, the higher the chances of converting them into buyers.
Conversion growth. By optimizing the experience and sales funnel, you can increase the percentage of visitors who perform the target action.
Building a brand community. By engaging people and encouraging user-generated content, many companies generate word-of-mouth advertising and receive free publicity.
Launching new products on the market. Online marketing allows you to test demand, differentiate yourself from competitors, and occupy your niche.
Increase in initial and repeat sales. By establishing communication with your audience at different stages of the funnel and after the purchase, you can stimulate revenue growth.
Expanding into new markets. The internet erases geographical boundaries, allowing you to attract customers from anywhere in the world. Competently configured campaigns will help you work with both local audiences and other countries.
Increased loyalty. By building long-term relationships, providing excellent service, and communicating regularly, you can turn one-time buyers into loyal brand fans.
Achieving a leading position in your niche. When used correctly, internet marketing can help you capture a larger share of the overall market and outperform your main competitors.
Advantages of online marketing over traditional advertising
Huge reach. Billions of people around the world use the global network — about 58% of the Earth’s population. By promoting yourself online, you can interact with potential customers regardless of their location.
Active target audience. For the most part, the internet is used by millennials and zoomers—generations for whom online shopping has become the norm. These people are not only willing to buy online, but also actively seek out information about brands and products there.
Precise targeting. Digital tools allow you to show advertising messages only to those people who best match the profile of your target customer. To optimize costs and increase conversion, you can target ads based on socio-demographic characteristics, interests, or user behavior.
High profitability. Compared to traditional advertising channels, the internet requires significantly less investment and offers greater returns. You only pay for interactions with a warm audience that is ready to buy.
Accessibility. While TV and radio require significant investment, it is entirely possible to start with minimal investment on the internet. Begin with small campaigns, analyze their performance, and gradually scale up your investment in the most effective channels.
Wide opportunities for interactivity. Internet marketers have a huge arsenal of tools at their disposal for engaging their audience, including clickable banners, interactive buttons, online tests, and surveys. Using these tools wisely will help increase the effectiveness of campaigns and attract more attention to the product.
Improved user experience. Unlike traditional advertising, online ads are more often perceived as useful content. This is because they are based on the interests of a specific person and are displayed in a relevant context. This reduces negativity and increases people’s willingness to interact with the brand.
Automation. Many processes (such as lead generation and communication) can be effectively automated. For example, you can set up a series of emails that will be sent to customers after they perform certain actions on the website. This saves time, increases loyalty, and helps marketers focus on strategic tasks.
Main types of internet marketing
There is a wide variety of types of internet marketing, which allows you to find solutions for businesses of any size. So, regardless of how long you have been in the market, how wide your audience is, or whether you sell goods or services, you will find a solution here that suits your needs and budget. Next, we will look at the main tools and discuss their pros and cons.
Contextual advertising
One of the most reliable ways to promote your business today. These are text, graphic, or video messages that appear in search results or on partner sites of advertising systems. In contextual advertising, you can set up targeting by region, keywords, demographics, interests, and many other criteria.
Another advantage of this tool is that the campaign starts working immediately after setup and moderation, unlike SEO, which takes several months to show results after the start of work.
In addition, you only pay for clicks on your ad (this type of advertising works on a PPC — pay per click — model). This means you don’t waste money on non-targeted audiences. At the same time, you can change your campaign settings, budget, cost per click, and ad texts in real time.
However, this only works if you have a positive balance in your advertising account. As soon as you stop paying, your ads will no longer be shown to users. In addition, due to banner blindness and ad blockers, part of your audience may miss your ads.
Search engine optimization
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) aims to bring a website to the top of organic search engine results for specific queries. Unlike contextual advertising, SEO provides long-lasting results. If you are in the top 3 search results, you can consistently attract traffic for months or even years.
If your website is on the first page of search results, this is already a kind of quality mark for potential buyers. After all, many people trust organic search results more than advertising.
Yes, the initial investment in SEO will be significant. But in the long run, it is a more economical channel for attracting traffic, because you don’t have to pay for each individual visit to the site.
But this tool also has its drawbacks. It takes time to get a website to the top of the rankings—usually several months. For new sites, this period will be even longer. Therefore, SEO is not suitable if you need quick sales here and now.
In addition, search algorithms are constantly changing, and competitors are not sleeping. To maintain your position, you need to continuously develop your platform — optimize old pages, add new ones, increase the number of links, etc.
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At the same time, organic search traffic directly depends on your website’s ranking. If your ranking drops as a result of algorithm updates or manual penalties, you will immediately lose most of your visitors.
SMM
Social media marketing is advertising on social networks. According to Broadband Search, in 2024, the number of social network users reached almost 4 billion people, each of whom spends an average of 2 hours and 27 minutes there every day.
Thus, a brand’s account on social networks such as Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok becomes a full-fledged platform for communicating with potential customers and increasing brand awareness.
An experienced SMM specialist develops a content strategy, generates and publishes interesting posts, launches contests and sweepstakes, attracts subscribers and leads. In addition, business accounts can publish not only entertaining content, but also useful expert materials.
Targeted advertising
It allows you to show advertisements to a specific target audience on social media based on specified parameters, such as age, gender, location, interests, etc.
At the same time, setting up targeting on popular social networks (Facebook or Instagram) is quite simple. If you are an experienced PC user, you will most likely be able to figure out this process on your own and launch a campaign.
However, targeting, like contextual advertising, has a significant drawback—it only works if you have funds in your account. When the daily budget is exhausted, impressions stop immediately. Therefore, targeting is best used in conjunction with other SMM elements to achieve a long-term effect.
Content marketing
The goal of content marketing is to inform others about the value of your offer, answer their questions and address their objections, and increase trust in your brand. According to the Content Marketing Association, 70% of consumers are more loyal to companies that share expert information.
This tool involves creating and distributing useful content online. Content marketing is effective both as a standalone tool and in combination with other promotional methods. At the same time, high-quality content can take many different forms. It can be:
Text materials. This refers to blog articles, product descriptions, news compilations, guides, and instructions. Anything that helps people solve problems and learn about your business.
Visual content. This includes vivid photos of products, infographics with statistics and useful facts, diagrams, and graphs. They simplify the perception of information and are more persuasive than a thousand words.
Video and audio. These can be product reviews, expert interviews, webinar recordings, podcasts. Multimedia formats are particularly popular and generate a high response among the audience.
Email marketing
Today, this tool is not as popular as it used to be. It is often underestimated by advertisers. However, if you have an up-to-date database of customer email addresses, it can help you solve a number of important tasks at a low cost.
For example, with the help of newsletters, you can regularly inform subscribers about new products, discounts, and fresh blog articles. Setting up newsletters is quite simple, and the effect will be long-lasting. People will not forget about your brand and will turn to you for purchases when the time is right.
In addition, trigger emails will help bring back customers who did not complete the target action. Let’s say they added items to their cart but never paid for their order. Remind them about it, offer them a bonus for their purchase, and they are likely to return.
You can also use letters that will elicit a positive response in any situation. These are personalized special offers and congratulations. Send your subscribers a promo code in honor of their birthday or first order, thank them for their long-term cooperation, and their loyalty to your brand will definitely increase.
Video advertising
Videos are currently the most popular form of content on the internet. Whereas video advertising used to be associated with pre-rolls and post-rolls on YouTube, it now covers all popular platforms, including social networks, messengers, and streaming services.
Such advertisements make it possible to convey a key message to the viewer in a vivid and convincing manner in just a couple of minutes. The right video will stimulate the desire to buy a product or service even without a direct call to action.
For example, a cosmetics brand can shoot a video with skin care tips, subtly demonstrating how to use its products. A clothing store can present models from its new collection, worn by attractive models in beautiful locations. A food delivery service can show the process of preparing a delicious meal and the happy face of the customer who placed the order.
Working with bloggers
We are talking about cooperation with opinion leaders on social media, whose authority and recommendations will help attract a new audience to your brand. Let’s say you sell handmade eco-cosmetics. Posting a message on a beauty blogger’s page with an audience of 500,000 subscribers will bring hundreds of visits to your website and dozens of orders.
At the same time, it is very important that the influencer creates a native post, organically integrating the product into their usual content and sincerely recommending it to their followers. If everything is done correctly, the result will be visible immediately—increased sales, comments and discussions, and increased trust in the brand. Influencer marketing works especially well for mass-market goods and services that can be ordered online in just a few clicks.
But to ensure that bloggers don’t have a destructive impact on your reputation, be extremely cautious when choosing partners. Focus not on the number of subscribers, but on their quality and engagement. It’s better to collaborate with micro-influencers in your field than to chase after millionaires in an irrelevant niche.
Affiliate marketing
Allows you to place ads on partner sites with payment for specific actions of attracted users—orders, registrations, subscriptions. This can be beneficial for both parties, as the partner receives a percentage of sales, and the advertiser pays only for actual results (since payment is charged only when target actions are performed).
This approach allows you to attract maximum targeted traffic if you choose partner sites wisely based on their subject matter. Cooperation with partners increases brand awareness and audience reach through presence on new platforms.
Chatbots
A properly configured bot can independently accept orders, answer typical questions, provide information about discounts and special offers, and notify customers about price reductions on selected products. This saves managers time and increases service speed.
However, setting up a chatbot requires certain skills and knowledge. Therefore, at the initial stage, it is better to hire a specialist who will help build dialogue scenarios and integrate the bot into the website or messengers. But such investments are usually fully recouped through the automation of routine processes.
How to improve the effectiveness of online marketing?
Focus on one channel. Before investing in different types of internet marketing, analyze your target audience and choose one channel that best suits your goals. Start with small investments and gradually scale up your marketing efforts when you see the first results.
Optimize your sales funnel. Analyze the buyer’s journey from initial contact with the brand to purchase. Identify key obstacles and provide relevant information at each stage to help dispel doubts. Use special offers, but avoid being overly pushy.
Adapt your content. Develop your own style of communication with your target audience, taking into account its specifics and platforms. Personalized content will increase the engagement and loyalty of potential customers, although this may not be easy at the initial stage.
Automate routine tasks. Use special tools to automate campaign setup and launch. This will save you time and increase the effectiveness of your online promotion. Many solutions are available for free or for a small fee.
Pay attention to your website. Your own web resource remains an important platform for promotion and sales. Make sure that pages load quickly, navigation is convenient, and there are no technical errors. Don’t forget about SEO optimization — high positions in search results will ensure stable traffic with minimal investment.
Use the power of video. Visuals are much more easily understood than text. High-quality videos can attract more attention and generate a greater response than even the most detailed text materials.
Don’t forget about remarketing. Re-engaging with existing customers can lead to significant sales growth. In some niches, remarketing is the main source of revenue.
