Online Marketing: Opportunities, Benefits and Challenges
Before online marketing platforms appeared, the cost to market products or services was often prohibitively expensive, and tradition marketing is difficult to measure. The television ad campaigns are measured through consumer focus groups to determine levels of brand awareness. These methods are not suitable for controlled experimentation. Nowadays, anyone can participate in online marketing by creating a website and pages on many platforms with a very low cost.
The online marketing has opened new ways to market the products or services. It offers great opportunities for any business to participate and share in the market. Online marketing has widely spread all over the world, opening new channels for marketing the business. For example, online marketing in Saudi Arabia has widely expanded all over the kingdom to keep up with the major modern techniques in marketing.
What is Online Marketing?
Online marketing is the practice of web-based channels to spread a message about a company’s brand, products, or services to its potential customers. The methods and techniques used for online marketing include email, social media, advertising and search engine optimization. The objective of online marketing is to reach potential customers through the platforms where they spend time reading, searching, shopping, or socializing online.
Widespread adoption of the Internet for business and personal use has generated many new platforms and channels for advertising and marketing engagement, such as those mentioned above. There are also many benefits and challenges inherent with online marketing, which uses digital mediums to attract, engage, and convert virtual visitors to customers.
Online marketing differs from traditional marketing, as traditional marketing has included mediums such as print, billboard, television and radio advertisements.
Benefits Of Online Marketing
The benefit of using online mediums for marketing a business or product is the ability to measure the impact of any given platform and how visitors acquired through different platforms interact with a website or landing page experience. From the visitors that convert into paying customers, analysis can be done to determine which platforms are most effective at acquiring valuable customers.
Challenges of Online Marketing
Although online marketing creates many opportunities for any business to grow its presence and build its audiences via the Internet, there are also inherent challenges with these methods of marketing. First, online marketing can become impersonal, due to the virtual nature of the message and content delivery to the audience. Marketers also must support their strategy for this type of marketing with a strong understanding of their customer’s needs and preferences. However, there are some techniques that can be used for this purpose such as surveys, user testing, and in-person conversations.
Also, online marketing can be very competitive. Although the opportunities to provide goods and services in both local and international markets is empowering, the competition keeps getting tougher. Companies investing in online marketing may find customers’ attention is difficult to capture due to the number of other businesses in the same field. Therefore, marketers have to develop a balance of building a unique value proposition and brand voice while they test and build marketing campaigns on various channels.
