Online marketing and consulting firm for the animal health industry
I recently ran across this definition for online marketing – Online Marketing is the art and science of selling products and/or services over digital networks, such as the Internet and cellular phone networks.
Simple but a bit outdated.
I then saw this definition – Online marketing refers to the placement of media along different stages of the customer engagement cycle through search engine marketing (SEM), search engine optimization (SEO), banner ads on specific websites, e-mail marketing, and Web 2.0 strategies.
Decent but a little heavy.
We can simplify the definition into three words – Follow, Share, Buy. Is it that simple? Yes and no. Let me explain.
Lets take a real life example, an example I see too often. Company A is looking at launching a new website. Everyone is excited as this certainly will lead to an early retirement and a second home in Belize. Maybe a little dramatic but I have seen organizations believe that a new website as the second coming. Soon the project begins and of course there are obstacles pushing the launch date back 3 to 4 months. Finally the new website is launched ($15,000 to $20,000 later) and it looks great. Everyone is standing around their computer waiting for the orders to come in. The first day, the first week, the first month is slow but things will certainly pickup as the new website looks so good. Soon enough company executives realize that their substantial investment is not producing the type of ROI they expected. Here lies the problem. Yes, Company A has a beautiful website but outside a press release announcing the new website the company isn’t doing anything to drive new and continual traffic to their site.
Now lets take a look at Company B. Company B decides to launch a new website but they also make the commitment to develop an online marketing strategy (courtesy of the President’s teenage daughter who keeps telling her dad how cool Twitter is). A well thought out and designed online marketing strategy will provide a number of benefits including…
- Drives new and continual traffic to your website
- Increases your organic search engine results
- Allows consumers to follow and share your message with others
- Generate new leads and customers
- Helps retain your current customers
Online marketing encompasses a wide range of strategies all revolved around the simple but very effective motto of Follow-Share-
The first step of a successful online marketing campaign is to get consumers (new and current) to follow you. There are a number of techniques that can be used but the most important technique to get followers is to establish your company as ‘the’ expert in your industry. This is accomplished by providing valuable content as content is king! This is done by writing news releases, articles, ebooks and white papers that indirectly sell your products and services. Nobody wants to follow a blog of articles and releases on how great your company and products are. Now take these written items and distribute them through online tools such as blogs, social media sites, social bookmarking sites, company website, and press release distribution services, just to name a few. In today’s world, consumers use the internet to find immediate answers. They use the internet to learn, to education, to resolve, to buy. For this reason, your company needs to be online providing valuable content to help answer the consumer’s needs.
Once a consumer finds your information valuable they will begin to ‘recommend’
The three steps of online marketing, Follow-Share-
Hopefully we have provided you a much better understanding, and definition, of online marketing. You can define online marketing a hundred different ways but lets keep it simple, but powerful – Follow-Share-
Read more articles from cheetahLink related to the animal health industry and online marketing on their blog at http://cheetahlink.wordpress.com/
