How Internet Marketing Can Help Your Business Grow

Internet marketing surely helps a business grow and succeed, especially when the right strategies, techniques, and tactics are used. This is also the reason why many business owners are already utilizing the power of Internet to promote their business to the online market. However, there are still a number of small and medium enterprise owners who have not yet applied online marketing to their business. They think that online marketing is costly, difficult to adapt, and will not really provide significant benefits to their business.

There are costs associated in doing online marketing. It’s also hard to apply it as a business strategy for the first time. But as business owners and entrepreneurs, we have to consider these risks and determine if the benefit can actually exceed its cost. Doing business involves risks anyway, right? Thus, if you haven’t yet tried to explore and maximize the Internet for marketing your business, let us reconsider how online marketing can help your business grow and succeed. Here are 12 things that Internet marketing can do for your business:

 

1. It can build your business presence online. The first thing that Internet marketing can do to your business is to give it an online presence through website development, blogging, social media pages creation, indexing with search engines, and other online marketing activities.

2. It can drive potential customers from search engines. Internet marketing includes search engine marketing, which involves paid search marketing and search engine optimization (SEO). These types of online marketing aim to make your business website and pages become more visible and rank higher on SERPs (search engine result pages) in search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

3. It can drive potential customers from other websites.  Online marketing also involves networking with other relevant websites, commenting and guest posting on relevant blogs, listing your business or website on online directories, and other techniques to promote your business in other websites that receive traffic or audience relevant to yours.

4. It can create attention from social media. Social media marketing, which is another type of Internet marketing, helps your business create buzz and build audience on the crowded social networking sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, and other social media sites, where your target market can be found.

5. It can help you target the right market or customers. Internet marketing is an optimized type of business marketing that helps you target the bull’s-eye. SEO helps you target your specific customers through geo-targeting and keyword targeting. Social media marketing also helps you define your target market according to their demographics.

6. It can encourage word-of-mouth marketing. If you have high-quality and excellent products, online marketing will help you deliver those products to more consumers. And since your business is easily accessible and linkable online through your website and social media pages, linking or telling the great things about your brand on the Internet is easier and more convenient. Bloggers can easily mention it and social media users (e.g. Facebook and Twitter users) can quickly share it to their friends and followers.

7. It can help you build relationship with current customers. Since communication with your customers, through your website, blog, email, and social media network, is more efficient, maintaining customer relationship is more achievable. You can regularly interact with your customers on your website, on your blog’s comments, on your Facebook Page, on your Twitter profile, and other online channels.

8. It can help you build authority and integrity for your business. By consistently doing quality business, keeping your customers happy, and spreading the good news about your business, you can boost your online integrity. Furthermore, if you can maintain a blog, Facebook Page, and other online pages that constantly help and inspire people, your authority would be lifted up.

9. It can control your online business reputation. Negative comments and mentions about your brand can happen online. Your competitors can even initiate those negative criticisms to attack your business. Whether they are true or not, online marketing, through online reputation management (ORM), can help you defend your business from those unfavorable publicity.

10. It can help you analyze important marketing data online. Internet marketing involves analyzing search engine analytics, evaluating social media insights, onsite website audit, and examining other important statistics to determine your marketing weaknesses and strengths. By using those marketing information, you would learn how to improve your weak areas and maximize your strengths.

11. It can reduce your overall marketing or advertising expense. Marketing, in general, is vital to business. You should do any kind of marketing to keep your business alive, whether it is the traditional way or the Internet way. But choosing Internet marketing is more cost-efficient than the traditional forms of advertising like billboard advertising, print ads, and TV commercials. Online marketing can even be initiated by one person.

12. It can boost your sales and profit. Finally, with all the benefits that online marketing can provide to your business, like increased market reach, growing number of customers, lasting customer relationship, and savings on advertising expense, your revenues, profit, and your business can grow.

Understanding the importance of Internet marketing to our business is a must for every business owner. We need to know how it can help us achieve our business and entrepreneurial goals. We should know the things that it can do to help us achieve business success. And if we realize that online marketing can be good to our business considering all the risks and costs involved, we have to give it a try either doing it on our own or delegating it to a professional Internet marketer.