Internet marketing: what it is and how it is done

Internet marketing: what it is and how it is done

The network now has a huge number of articles devoted to advertising on the Internet. All of them are full of various specific terms like “targeting”, “context”, “media banner” and many others. For those whose profession is related to marketing, all these terms are not difficult. But the problem is that articles similar to ours are not aimed at professionals (what to talk to them, they already know everything), but at those who are either completely unfamiliar or superficially familiar with the topic of promoting services or products on the Internet. And in this article, we will try to explain everything so that it is clear to such readers.

We will make a reservation that this article is not the ultimate truth and there may be many opinions that will challenge the facts and information described below. We did not set out to write a short textbook on marketing or a new set of rules for marketers, but wanted to convey to those who are not familiar with the topic of marketing, the main points that will help you not get lost among the types of advertising and various specific terms.

To begin with – what is Internet marketing, what types of it are found on the Internet and how to understand all this.

At the moment, it is difficult to find a person who at least once in his life has not searched for information, goods or services on the Web. The modern world dictates its own rules of doing business, and a huge number of companies transfer part or all of their activities to the expanses of the world Wide Web. Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft Corporation, once said: “If your business is not on the Internet, then you are not in business.” A phrase that now reflects the whole essence of international big business – it works for everyone and around the globe. But what should small and medium – sized businesses-those whose audience or business specifics are limited by the territory or other features-do? It’s simple – modern technologies for analyzing the data that you transmit using the Internet allow you to determine exactly where your target audience should be.

Here we come across the first term of Internet marketing, and in general of all marketing as a service sector. The “target audience”, or CA, as it is briefly called, is those people, Internet users, who may be or are already your customers. What does “maybe” mean? What data we collect through the various web services like Yandex or Google, you know about Your potential customers more than You think. And, when you place an ad, it can be shown to all those who not only make a direct request right now, but also if such a person has ever applied to search for a service before. Since 2005, to be precise – that’s when Google officially announced the beginning of the collection of personal data of users to improve the performance of its advertising network. Before that, all personal data was depersonalized and averaged, without providing information about a particular user.

Now imagine how much information we have gathered here the search engines Yandex and Google for all his work? How much information about our interests, needs, location, and so on is stored on their servers? Scared? But it is also useful if you are an entrepreneur.

So, we turn to what is actually a modern Internet marketing and what types of advertising and promotion used in it, the most popular at the moment.

To date, the concept of Internet marketing can be formulated as an accurate selection of the target audience of the client on the Internet to further attract attention and implement the conversion from the target audience to the buyer of the service or product.

And again some terrible word-CON-VER-SI-Ya…

There is nothing terrible about it – in fact, it has many synonyms that are not used in marketing: transformation, transformation, transformation, transition, conversion. Conversion is the transformation of an ordinary Internet user into your client. And that’s good!

We have figured out what Internet marketing is, but now it is worth understanding what its varieties (types of advertising) are most popular now.

At the moment, the most popular types are the following:

– contextual advertising;

– display advertising;

– targeted advertising;

– email marketing;

– advertising on thematic sites (blogs and forums).

And again, many terms that came to us from the language of the inhabitants of the foggy Albion. We’ll figure them out, too. Gradually.

Also, SEO can be attributed to Internet marketing, but there is so much material and information on this type of promotion that it is better to consider it in a separate article (or two…), and we will briefly consider the basics at the end.

Contextual advertising

We’ll start with this type of contextual advertising.

Based on the term “context”, which means the main meaning of a word or phrase, this type of advertising is based on the questions that your potential client asks on the Internet. To be more precise-in search engines. When a prospective client searches for a service, for example, “care of rabbits” or say. “where is to develop a website” in Google or Yandex, the system defines a set of proposals on the basis of what is already in its database – once upon a previously indexed sites.

Indexing is the process by which the search engine determines which types of services and which search phrases to display a particular site. Let’s say you have created a website for selling fishing equipment and there are various words and phrases related to fishing everywhere. So, after some time, if you use special tools like Yandex. Webmaster to ask the search engine to index the site, another user will see the site in the search for such words or phrases. True, in fact, the process of indexing and promotion is somewhat more complex and consists of many related actions, but the general essence is shown here.

And here it is worth asking the question: “And if I need the user to see my site now, and not after some time and sometime?” Of course, because the entrepreneur needs to sell services and goods today, and not in the nth period of time. Here, the tools for placing contextual advertising come to the rescue, which allow you to show your site in the search results immediately, but for your hard money. “Advertising is the engine of trade” (Ludwig mettsel) and judging by the huge number of different companies, showing as advertising in the search engines Yandex and Google, quite a good engine.

Accordingly, if you place contextual advertising in search engines, then, depending on the selected budget, you will be shown in the search results together with the so-called “organic” or natural results. Usually, the order of placement is as follows: the first 3-4 lines of results are advertising, while the 1st line is always the most desirable and detailed-once you get to it, you will be able to convey as much information to the user as possible, since the largest amount of space is allocated for it. Then there are the natural issues. And already at the very end, 3-4 more places are reserved for advertising. Such places are not so effective, but they also bring results… Sometimes.

It would seem – here it is, a gold mine!!! Why do you need sales managers, cold calls, mailing offers, and other ways to attract customers? Yes, for one simple, but not always obvious reason – in order for your entire budget for contextual advertising not to merge into simple onlookers, who are even more in the network than on the street, it must be properly configured and constantly monitored. In addition, the site itself will not answer for you to the client and will not interest him in the service – the manager will still have to communicate. Although there are already interesting solutions here, such as specialized automated systems, robots that can answer the call. But for now, they are still far from a good sales manager.

Think for yourself, would you like to see the offer “building a house” or, say, “legal services”, hit by such queries as “building a house yourself” or “legal services what is it”? Or, say, you provide services in the city of Voronezh, and the user will come from Chelyabinsk. At the same time, in all such situations, if there is no competent configuration and tracking, your budget will be spent.

Yes, as in any other field of activity, contextual advertising requires professionalism and responsibility, since everyone can “drain” your money into the pipe, and correctly spend it on advertising that will bring new customers every day, and even remind old ones of you – here knowledge, experience and skills are needed.

What do we have in the dry balance of contextual advertising?

it is effective and can bring a sufficient number of customers;
requires fine tuning, as well as constant monitoring and analysis
it won’t work if you don’t have someone on your end of the line who will take the customer and take him further.

At the same time, contextual advertising can be quite a good option with a small budget.

How to determine the budget? Here, everything is based on the scope of your activity, the territory and the well-constructed semantic core of the campaign.

Oh, those terms! Semantic core-evokes something from the category of the atomic nucleus or nuclear reaction… Although it’s different for everyone. Here, too, everything is quite simple – the semantic core is a set of basic (key) words, phrases and phrases, on the basis of which an advertising campaign will be created. So, for a seemingly simple query “buy a watch”, you can make a huge number of different phrases: where to buy a watch, buy a watch cheap, buy a watch with a chain, etc.At the same time, you can add the brand of the watch, the price, the city, and much more. All these sets, combined and optimized into a single structure, will form the semantic core of your advertising campaign.

And based on this kernel, you can calculate the budget – in Google there are even special services for the forecasting of costs. But here it is worth remembering that the forecast is just a FORECAST, and not an exact calculation of the cost of the campaign in a particular period of time.

How is the forecast made? Each key phrase and word has a certain cost – the cost for the user’s transition to your site, information about which is placed in the ad. It is determined by holding an auction among all those who placed such an ad, taking into account all the settings (the region of the event, the display sites, etc.). Thus, if you have a small set of keywords, a limited display area, and even a daily budget limit (such an amount that you are not willing to pay more than a day for traffic to the site), then the budget can meet several thousand rubles for a whole month. True, you should not expect that you will get a million customers at once, but with a high order cost, for example, with a ratio of the cost of switching to the cost of the service of 1: 25 – 1:30 or more, even 2-3 customers per month can not only fully recoup advertising, but also make the business profitable. For example, let’s imagine a tutoring service for preparing for admission to a university. For example, one class with a tutor costs 1000 rubles, the minimum number of classes for an applicant is 10 or more. The average cost of clicking on a link (click) is from 30 to 100 rubles. With an average conversion rate of 4% and a campaign budget of 10,000 rubles, the number of new students per month will be from 4 to 12-13 people, each of whom will bring you from 10,000 rubles or more. Total – from 40,000 to 130,000 rubles of revenue against 10,000 rubles of the advertising budget. And this is in an approximate approach. With fine-tuning of the campaign, the conversion rate can be increased to 7-10%, and modern conversion enhancement services guarantee even more. Although this is a completely different story.

Now let’s look at the tools, or rather services, that are most often used to place such ads.

At the moment the most popular, unsurprisingly, services from Google and Yandex: Yandex.Yandex. Direct and Google Advertising. We will refer to them in other sections of the article, as these are general advertising services from search engines that allow you to configure contextual, display, and many other types of online advertising.

How do they differ?

First of all, each of them allows you to place ads only in the same search engine in which it is presented.

The next point that ultimately turns out to be important is the audience of the service. Due to the fact that Google is initially a foreign company, the volume of users in the search engine in the Russian segment of the Internet is still lower than in Yandex. On the other hand, if you are ready to work all over the world and are not tied to a specific point on the map, Google will be more effective.

And the last item in this list, which we would like to refer to the main ones, is the language basis of the services. It implies many features of working with them. So, whether because Yandex was originally created in Russia, or because the main audience of the service is Russian, but this search service better parses Russian words and then filters and combines various minor nuances in the results – different word endings, prepositions and conjunctions, and much more. This approach greatly simplifies the creation of an advertising campaign, since in this situation, the queries “where to buy a stroller” and “where to buy strollers” will be combined into one when displaying the results. Google has difficulties with this – it will assign such phrases to different queries.

Display advertising

The next type of online advertising is display advertising.

Display advertising is the placement of information about your services and offers in the form of graphic banners. By the way, a banner can act as a graphic image, as well as video, animation, text and graphic complex. In other words, you make a picture in the image editor, where you place information about the product, and show it to the interested audience.

It is worth noting that the roots of display advertising to some extent come from contextual advertising, but at some point they were divided into separate categories. Why is this happening? The fact is that all banners are displayed based on the history of users ‘ search queries. In addition, setting up a list of the main phrases for which a particular banner will be displayed is similar to the same process when creating a contextual advertising campaign. With all the ensuing consequences, which were discussed earlier.

But it is worth stopping and wondering – after all, there is not much space in search engines for various images or videos, so then where will these banners be displayed? Or what might be their cost of accommodation? Wouldn’t it be cheaper to build a competitor to Elon Musk’s SpaceX?

In fact, such ads will be displayed on a huge number of different sites that are part of the so-called advertising network. Yandex have similar kind of so-called Advertising network “Yandex” or “Yan”, and Google – “Google display network” or “CCM”. So, all resources that are part of the Yandex company or have signed a contract with this search engine will show your banners. In the case, of course, if the budget allows you to do this.

About the budget for a display campaign-the calculation is similar to contextual advertising, but the cost of one click may differ in a big way, since in display advertising, the audience coverage of potential customers is already higher and includes everyone who has ever searched for a service like yours and is located on one of the partner sites of the search network, and this is noticeably more people than those who are looking for such a service at a particular time in the search engine.

Since display advertising is very similar in the way it is configured to contextual advertising, to the point that the same Yandex tools are used.Yandex. Direct and Google advertising, we will not talk about this again, but we will consider some features of banner placement.

You’ve probably noticed that banner sizes vary from site to site. Indeed, it is. For example, Yandex YAN works with 2 types of text and image banners (1:1 and 16:9 ratios), as well as with 12 different sizes of graphic banners. No one forces you to place all types of banners, but the more different types, the more sites will be used for the display, which, in turn, will bring more customers to you.

That seems to be all that can be said when describing the essence of display advertising. And you probably already guessed that most often such advertising is used in conjunction with contextual advertising. As a result, a professionally constructed advertising campaign should include all the types of advertising listed earlier, including targeted advertising, which will be discussed later.

Targeted advertising

Let’s start by defining what is targeted advertising and how it differs from contextual advertising. The word “target” (from the English target – goal, target) defines this type of advertising as aimed at a certain audience, the same target audience. The question arises – how does it differ from contextual or media?

The answer here lies in the origins of the attitude to the construction of an advertising campaign of one kind or another. When creating contextual or display ads, the marketer relies on a lot of key queries that can be used to find your ad, while in targeted advertising, he relies on research about your customer’s characteristics. So, the following features can be used::

• age;
• floor;
• location;
• interests
• profession and much more.

That is, the ad display is not based on the past time, but predicts the future based on the touch points of the user’s characteristics (read – your client) with the features of your service or product.

Facebook Instagram, Telegram, Facebook, Vkontakte, Odnoklassniki, and other social networks are the main platforms for displaying such ads, and this is another important feature of targeted advertising.

This is because it is on the basis of data from social network pages that you can build a user image and build the structure of your target audience.

What is the budget of such advertising? Here everything depends very much on the scope of your activity and audience coverage. For example, if you have a service sector, and it is also limited geographically, then for 100 rubles a day + VAT, you can get up to 2-3 thousand impressions on Instagram, and from them get from 10 to 50 potential customers. At the same time, the advantage of targeted advertising is its long-lasting effect. For example, a service was shown to a user who currently has no need for it, but the history of his requests or the specified interests contain such information. Or such a user has subscribed to your profile on the network. Then he can advise you to his friends, or contact you later, when he needs such a service, since he has already recognized you, and besides, he is periodically shown your posts and stories.

Which social networks should I advertise on? Again – here everything is very individual, but you can highlight some trends and popular solutions at the moment.

So, one of the main platforms for the promotion of services in the field of B2C (public services, retail, small business, where the main customer is an individual, etc.) is the social network Instagram. Also, for this category of services and products, the Telegram messenger is gaining particular popularity. But this does not mean that other networks and messengers do not have a target audience – for effective advertising, you need to use a set of tools and tools.

Targeted advertising has one drawback – it is quite problematic to conduct it for the B2B sphere (business for business) within the framework of medium and large businesses. Yes, there are some excellent examples of good advertising, but you must agree that it will be difficult to advertise any pneumatic valves for oil refineries on Instagram… Although anything is possible. But for such a scale, there is another type of advertising that can be more effective – e-mail-mailing.

E-mail-mailing list

Another type of online advertising, which many people habitually consider the cheapest and simplest.

Indeed, it would seem that it is much easier to compose a letter and make a mailing list to many addresses. Here are just a few unrecorded moments that immediately appear:

how to write a letter correctly?
how to make it attractive?
how to make mass mailing simple and convenient?
how to avoid getting into the spam list of mail servers?
how much effort, time and money will it take to do all this in the end?
And here it is already worth considering each item separately.

The first is the structure of the letter. It is no secret that a modern Internet user does not read long messages (unless, of course, he expects a long, capacious letter). Any large and complex advertising message will immediately be sent to the trash, at best, and in the worst case – to the spam list. In addition, the composition of the letters is now too uniform – everyone uses the same advice on active sales, marketing… Yes, even by the way of life. As a result, most advertising messages, especially those dedicated to IT and Internet services, are more like leaflets of religious sects with texts like ” We are the ones who will bring you true happiness! Only we need your money. But happiness is more important than money! Bring them and may you be happy! ” The result is all in spam.

The second question is the attractiveness of the letter. The plain text of an email against the background of a bright and stylish design of the interface of mail services (mail, yandex, Google, and others) will fade and will not be taken seriously.

In such a situation, the HTML markup of the letter will come to the rescue with the appropriate stylization of the elements, as well as the placement of various media information in the letter: photos, videos, diagrams, and the like.

Will everyone be able to make a competent letter in the HTML markup language? But such a message will fly to spam with a much lower probability.

Another term that refers more to web development is HTML markup. In order for the sites that you use every day to have the right structure, appearance, usability, and many other features, various specialized tools are used, which are based on: HTML markup language, CSS cascading style sheets, and programming languages (here the choice is richer: JavaScript, PHP, Python, Java, Ruby, and many others). To create a specific structure, HTML is used. Due to the fact that any email is actually a small page on the Internet, the creation of such a page is based on the principles of web development.

The next point is mass mailing. Sending a letter to 20-30 recipients via the mail service seems to be a boring, but feasible task. Sending 200-300 recipients is already more difficult. Given that most services limit the maximum number of recipients, it turns out that such a task will take a decent amount of time.

Another unpleasant point – specifying all the recipients in the main recipients, they will all see each other in the “to” column of the incoming email, which, again, will most likely lead to spam or trash.

Here, special e-mail mailing services like MailChimp, or built-in various CMS modules for sending messages, are already coming to the rescue. However, there is one ” but ” – such services and modules already cost money. Either to buy a module (software solution), or a subscription – all one, e-mail marketing is no longer a free tool.

The question of how not to get into the spam list follows from all the previous points – only if you follow a number of rules and measures, your address will not be classified as “spam”. For example, the presence of a large number of addresses in the “to” column will most likely contribute to the inclusion of your email address in the spam list on the servers.

In addition, there is another task that precedes all of the above – who to send emails to. If the service provides you with contextual, display, and targeted advertising for potential customers, then to get a list of addresses, you must either collect it yourself or purchase it. Now you can find offers in various fields and categories on the Web.

What is the result? An e-mail newsletter can be an inexpensive or even free way to convey information about a service or product to your customers. If you follow the security measures, learn the basics of HTML and have enough patience, you can implement this method of online advertising without financial costs. To organize a truly mass and effective mailing list, you need to have enough knowledge and competencies, as well as the amount of funds to obtain a database of addresses and purchase software.

Of the types of online advertising proposed in the article, the last one remains-the placement of commercial offers on thematic sites.

Advertising on thematic sites

Another variety of relatively inexpensive ways to convey information about a product to potential customers is to place ads and posts on various resources dedicated to the field of activity of your company or the proposed product. These can be blogs, forums, information portals, online bulletin boards, various communities, and other types of Internet sites. Some of these resources provide free features, and some cost money, but in any case, this method is a rather specific type of advertising.

An interesting fact is that the considered method of promotion can significantly help in the field of medium and large businesses, since purchasing managers in such organizations are very often registered on several sites at once, where they either look for various offers, or discuss similar topics. This, of course, is not the ultimate truth, but it is for this type of business that advertising on forums and blogs can give the greatest return due to the narrow focus of the topics discussed, the presence of a large number of professionals from the right field and the low cost of placing ads.

In such advertising, it is difficult to get a cost forecast, since everything depends heavily on the scope of application.

What platforms should I use? The more serious the attitude of the owners of the resource to the quality of content and control over the behavior of participants, the higher the probability that there are really professionals from the right field, because scandals and trolling attract rather unformed and narrow-minded minds.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is one of the tools of Internet marketing. It can be defined as a method of promoting a business on the network (by webmasters-partners), in which the partner receives a reward for each visitor, subscriber, buyer and/or sale made thanks to his efforts.

A selection of offers from our partner network – https://marketplace.indoleads.com.

Conclusion

At the end of the article, I would like, first of all, to congratulate those who have reached this point – you are patient and attentive readers! And, secondly, to note that in the promotion of services and products on the Internet, very rarely any specific type of advertising is used. In almost all cases, it is necessary to implement a set of measures and display advertising on a variety of sites and using various methods – in the form of context in search, graphic banners on various resources, product promotion in social networks, sending letters to the most expensive customers and communicating on forums and blogs. With this approach, information about your product (or service) will reach the maximum possible number of potential customers.

And one more important point!

At the beginning of the article, such an interesting type of promotion as SEO was mentioned and a promise was made to briefly mention it.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization, in translation-Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Optimization or Search Resource Optimization) is a set of measures to promote your site in “organic” search results. Yes, it is in the very ones that were discussed in the section on contextual advertising. But SEO has little in common with advertising in the classical sense, since it involves developers who optimize the site code, copywriters who write the right texts for the site and articles, and even involves various well-known sites, organizations and individuals who are mentioned at various events and in public speeches (including not only online) about your product. Thus, SEO is more like an election campaign than a product advertisement. Although in the election campaigns you are trying to advertise the merits of the candidate and his superiority over other participants. And what is SEO for in the end? By the time your site has the right structure, contains the necessary and unique phrases and articles, and is mentioned in various third-party sources, search engines will receive, structure and analyze the data and show the site in the search results for various collected keywords.

An interesting fact – in the Russian-language Internet, there is often such a definition as CEO, which, as you know, is not quite true, since with this writing you may not be understood by your foreign partners and colleagues. If we talk about the Russian abbreviation, it would be more correct to say OPS or OPR, in extreme cases – PO. And CEO in English means the position of the highest executive in the organization – Chief Executive Officer or Chief Executive Officer.

A selection of offers from our partner network – https://marketplace.indoleads.com.