"I have a search engine friendly website, I'm not on page one of Google, weekly email newsletters are not being sent out, what is 'tweeting'? who are bloggers? where are all my facebook fans?...!!!!
Having a website does not mean you have magically created an online marketing department that will promote your business for free. Online marketing is multi-faceted, time consuming, hard work, and fast changing - but if you put in the effort and get it right - you will reap the rewards in no time and watch your client base soar.
7 key aspects of Online Marketing - all revolving arond your core website and geared to driving more potential customers towards your products and services:
- Email Marketing
- Social Media Marketing
- PPC Advertising
- Blogging
- Analytics
- Conversion Optimisation
- Lead Generation
Once you have optimised your website content, it is time to let the online world know who you are and what you offer. This is called Online Marketing. There are a variety of methods you can use to drive traffic to your website. This section of our site gives further information with regards to these methods and how you might go about using them for your website.
The term 'online marketing' (sometimes referred to as e-marketing or web-marketing) usually refers to all of the various online activities that can be carried out to promote a website and increase the online visibility of your business.
Online marketing techniques and activities are broad and often overlap with each other, as well as with some SEO techniques. This can make it difficult to assign each of them into a single category, and can also lead to confusion, especially with the terminology being interpreted differently by different people.
What is important is that they all rely on a well built modern website that will be used to direct customers to in order to establish contact and view your products or services.
Online marketing techniques and activities include:
- email marketing
- Pay per Click (PPC) advertising
- Blogging
- Banner advertising
- Social Media
- Online videos
- Partnering and clustering
- Media releases
- Customer reviews (i.e. Trip Advisor)
These activities can be split into free and paid.
Free activities
- Social marketing: as Web 2.0 evolves, it is more important than ever to recognise and engage in social marketing. At the very least, a business should monitor what is being said about its products or services on mainstream social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and TripAdvisor. Ignoring social media would not be wise as they are the mediums your potential travellers use to research and book travel.
- Search Engine listing: appearing in search engine listings is free. A site that is Search Engine Friendly, has a good search engine optimisation strategy and an investment in terms of the time is all that is required to keep ensure a site is effectively listed.
- Linking strategy: getting other relevant sites to link to your website does not ncessarily involve money but relies on the content provided on your website being relevant to the sites linking to you. Having quality and relevant websites linking to you will make a positive difference in your search engine rankings. Sourcing links should be part of your search engine optimisation strategy.
Paid activities
- Pay per click (PPC): paying search engine to promote a website. The key difference with unpaid (also known as organic) search engine results is how they are positioned on the page. The key players in PPC are:
- Google: Google AdWords
- Yahoo: Yahoo! Search Marketing
- MSN/Bing: Microsoft adCenter
- Other online marketing activities that a small tourism business would have to pay for would be for instance:
- Having a banner advertisement on another site
- Paying for a link from other directories which are not free of charge
- Email Marketing
- Blogging