The internet and internet technologies are enabling incredible opportunities for small and medium size business and industries in this time of COVID-19.
Indeed, the pandemic is making a profound impact on entire business and marketing environments everywhere in the world today. Monitors of business trends are forecasting that digital strategies will be a most significant source of competitive advantage in the post COVID-19 business environment.
Since the beginning of the year 2020 the world has witnessed how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted and disrupted the way of life for millions. Disruptions have come from government restrictions on movement, new business regulations and consumers’ attitudinal changes.
As COVID-19 continues to evolve, it continues to affect and cause changes how work and production are organised. Governments have directed employers to, as much as possible, enable employees to work from home. Similarly, the pandemic is engendering attitudinal change and adoption of new habits, including how and what consumers buy.
Already, some of the world’s most influential business consulting firms have noted some significantly accelerating behavioural changes by consumers in response to COVID-19, which business entities, as a matter of survival, must adapt to.
Some of the major forces that are driving behavioural changes and changes in the business and marketing environments are largely driven by
- extreme public health measures including lockdowns, general restrictions on movement of people and mandatory wearing of masks that governments and local authorities are instituting in order to control and limit the spread of COVID-19 infections;
- new regulatory requirements for businesses and employers to ensure protection and safety from infection for employees, customers and the public;
- personal choices and attitudinal changes, and commitment to practice certain behavioural changes in adaptation to the new realities of life (including loss of income) as a means of survival during the pandemic.
These forces are rapidly reshaping human attitudinal and behavioural changes rapidly across cities and communities today. For example, consumers are increasingly wearing face masks and attempting to minimise contact with others as much as they can.
To get things done, people are turning to the internet now, more than ever. Governments and employers have encouraged employees to work from home as much as practicable. Shoppers now are going online more than they have ever before. It’ s not surprising the founder and president of the online retail giant, Amazon has been reported to be on the way to becoming the world’s first trillionaire out of growth of business during the COVID-19 outbreak. Similarly, Telecom companies have reported significant growth in internet traffic during this periods of COVID-19 and lockdowns.
Again, as COVID-19 infections continue to rise globally and adaptation measures unfold, monitors of business trends, including some of the world’s most influential business consulting firms, are forecasting that digital strategies, (including online marketing) will become a most significant source competitive advantage in the post COVID-19 business environment.
By way of definition, online marketing is any form of advertising or promotion of products, personalities, events, locations, enterprises, ideas, etc. online or on the internet. Online marketing can be done organically for free or paid for, and there a number of approaches to doing online marketing. It is a very efficient and cost-effective area of marketing. In this article, we’ll take a look at the usual forms and how you can grow your business with online marketing.
- Email Marketing
- Search Engine Optimisation
- Search Engine Marketing
- Digital Content Marketing
- Display Advertising
- Social Media Marketing
- Influencer Marketing
- Affiliate Marketing
Forms of Online Marketing
- Email Marketing
E-mail marketing is a practice in the domain of marketing communication, where a business entity creates and sends promotional messages and advertisements by email to a large target audience with the aim to elicit specific, desired responses or action. These emails look a lot different from those we send from our personal emails; they are usually formatted to look like a webpage with a combination of texts and images.
One of the basic requirements for this form of online marketing is that the business entity must have already collected email addresses of the intended audience. They may be collected by encouraging users of a business entity’s website to signup to receive product information and offers. But it is very essential that a business that executes email marketing must provide a means for users to unsubscribe from receiving promotional emails whenever they wish to do so.
- Search Engine Optimisation
The goal of Search Engine Optimisation is to, as much as possible, place your webpage and content on top on internet search results pages whenever a user does a search for specific keywords. Search Engine Optimisation is the process of developing content around certain relevant keywords and formatting webpages according to certain standards, of web technology, so that they can be efficiently found, crawled and indexed by search engine bots, to be served when a user does a search for those keywords.
The essence of search engine optimisation lies in the fact that click-through-rates fall sharply as the webpage drops farther away from the top position in search results. Webpages, therefore, must be optimised to help ensure they are ranked high in search results for the relevant keywords.
- Search Engine Marketing / Search Advertising
Search Engine Marketing is the practice where paid advertisements are used, usually by a business entity, to promote a webpage to appear at a desired location in search engine results. Through paid advertising, snippets of a webpages are displayed on the desired positions for specified keywords on search engine results pages. It is a means of promoting webpages by increasing their visibility through search.
- Digital Content Marketing
Digital Content Marketing is the process of planning, creating and distributing multimedia content of various forms and formats to a target audience or consumers, in pursuit of determined marketing communication objectives. Content marketing may be executed through an entity’s own website and social media pages or by way of sponsored content on other websites including appropriate influential blogs or through a combination of any of the channels above. Content strategy and calendar are essential requirements for a successful content marketing project.
- Display Advertising
Display advertising is a form of online advertising which deals with, usually, rectangular boxes containing various formats of text and images combinations, that may be placed on websites. Display ads are often placed in the header and footer sections, sidebars, and in-line and in-text.
Google Ads is one of the biggest online advertising networks, and re-marketing is one of the great features of that network. When a user clicks an ad and is directed to webpage, say a product webpage for instance, the network saves that activity on its memory. When the same user visits a different webpage another time, he or she may be shown an ad for the page visited earlier, as a prompt to visit again. The goal is to optimise an ad’s exposure and attention values. That’s how re-marketing works.
- Social Media Marketing
The use of social media to develop a community around brands, personalities and enterprises to build a brand, drive audience engagement and website traffic, and increase sales. Currently, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are the most popular platforms for social media marketing.
Social media pages have to be updated with scheduled posts regularly to sustain users’ interest, but also its also necessary that managers have to take advantage of spontaneous occurrences and create buzz, to drive engagement with their brands.
- Influencer Marketing
Influencer Marketing is a form of social media marketing that’s primarily a combination of the time-tested celebrity endorsements and testimonials from satisfied consumers. Social media influencers are personalities who have attained a status of authority and influence in a given field or just on a social media platform. They may be sports people, actors, performers, or just anyone who has been able to attract a very large population of followers on social media.
Each social media platform has developed its own scheme for the authentication of influencer pages, to differentiate the legit from the fake. Whenever a page meets a platform’s verification requirements, it is marked with a symbol of verification.
There is a perception of the mark of verification as a status symbol among a section of social media users. It signals validation of one’s status as an influencer or a celebrity. For this reason, wannabe social media influencers pursue verification with all their might.
- Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing in which a business pays a commission or rewards one or more affiliates for each customer brought or sales made through the affiliate’s own marketing efforts.
Now you grow your business with online marketing types that we’ve looked at. They enable and enhance competitive advantage, more so in the period of COVID-19 and the social changes that are evolving.
Why Grow Your Business With Online Marketing
There are a number of exciting advantages when you grow your business with online marketing.
- Better Data for Segmentation and Targeting In online marketing a business is able to make a granular definition of its target audience. Internet advertising networks and others who measure consumers online activities hold a large amount of incredibly accurate information on online activities and behaviour patterns of internet users. Such granular data enhances the segmentation and targeting of markets and audiences.
- Far Reach Advertisers can reach very large audiences across several geographical boundaries and irrespective of device, mobile or desktop.
- High Speed Online marketing has speed. So businesses are able to reach consumers with promotional messages and advertising very fast. Imagine how internet data travels from one point on the surface of earth to another, and how almost instantaneously a Facebook post, for example, show-ups on a user’s timelime.
- Low Cost
Online marketing is relatively inexpensive when compared with other forms of marketing such as the old-school marketing.
- Greater Control The tools of the digital domain provide you with greater control over your digital channels, campaigns and budgets when you choose to grow your business with online marketing.
Finally, with online marketing, the same media and channels are available for the small business and the big business alike. WordPress power this blog the same way it powers any large online news channel anywhere in the world. That’s one way technology levels the playing field for business and the reason you should start to grow your business with online marketing now.
LE
Great and amazing article