They are an all-inclusive terms for all activities related to selling products, promoting services or providing information on the internet — online.
An online marketing strategy integrates every action involved in promoting the information on your website in the best and most efficient way, including devising the overall guidelines for design, content acquisition and development, search engine optimization, any form of advertising (pay-per-click, etc), associated research as well as measuring performance and tracking results - just to name the major parts.
The overall purpose of online oarketing is to attract qualified traffic to your website: to turn visitors into customers, page hits into conversions and to implement additional measures needed to continuously improve your ROI.
Whether you already have a website and are looking to optimize it or are planning on developing one, you should always consult with a professional first. While this is common practice for any other major project, it still isn't applied with the same diligence and common sense to an online venture.
The old "build it and they will come" ideology does not apply to websites. You have to promote your site, invite your visitors in, convince them to stay and you have to be trustworthy and credible enough to be able to close the deal.
The chance that someone will just by pure coincidence drive by and discover your site, is almost zero. In the real world this is how you might discover a new store or a new restaurant, but online it just doesn't happen.
Would you ever start building a house without a plan? Of course not. How absurd. Yet people build websites every day without even having the slightest plan, without any kind of concept or without having conducted any kind of research..
They end up with more or less professional, more or less nice looking orphans somewhere in cyberspace. Websites nobody knows about, websites nobody cares about. Don't become one of them.
Talk to us before you start building.
