Marketing is a critical function in any organization. Marketing teams work together with Sales department to sell the products and services of the company. With Internet revolution, the very techniques of selling and marketing are changing rapidly.  In fact, many companies are now making products, like online music and e-greeting cards, which are sold only through Internet and hence Internet marketing is a subject that everyone should learn.

 

Internet marketing is known by many names. Web marketing, online marketing or simply electronic Marketing are the names used by people. Internet marketing in itself is made of many techniques or strategies. For example, sending mass emails is one of the earliest forms of Internet marketing. This technique is still followed by many and is called email marketing. Unfortunately with email engines becoming smarter, most of the emails especially from smaller companies end up in spam boxes and are unread by the potential buyer.

However, reputed companies are still able to get net traffic on their websites by sending relevant emails to their existing or potential customers.  Banner ads or online product demonstrations is also an Internet Marketing strategy. Search engine optimization and search engine marketing is the newest way of increasing visitor traffic and business. Over the past couple of years, the patterns of net surfing have changed. Few years back before the development of good search engines, people were forced to memorize website names and type it in the address bars. But with the revolution in search engines technologies, Yahoo! and Google have become home page of many netizens. And this change in web surfing pattern has created a concept called search engine optimization popularly known by its acronym SEO. Websites now pay to Internet experts to appear on the first search result page of Google or Yahoo!

 

Internet marketing strategies can be used in various type of online business. The first type of online business where it is used is ecommerce. People try to attract more and more visitors to their websites and hope they will buy something on the site. Online advertisement banners are other way of making money by Internet marketing. Use your website to advertise others company’s products and get paid regular monthly rental and also a commission. There are other techniques developing but yet to mature and get mass acceptance.

 

There are many advantages of Internet marketing. Low cost, fast to deploy, increasing number of net surfers and ability to get faster feedback from buyers is making it successful. But it also has its limitations. Ecommerce revenues are still to reach a respectable level for a big company. Security is a big concern. And it cannot replace the look and feel buying advantage offered by old brick and mortar marketing techniques. Can anyone imagine buying a car over Internet without even having a real look at it?

 

In spite of all the hiccups, it is making fast progress. With no major innovation in sales and marketing space, Internet marketing is looked upon and will continue to be looked upon as the next big stimulus to make more money.