Internet marketing: 9 expert strategies & tips for online success

Whether it’s a startup or a scaling enterprise, you’ll rarely find a business without some kind of online presence. Standing out among this crowd requires thoughtful internet marketing strategies that engage a more diverse — and distracted — audience.

This pivot toward digital tactics allows companies to transform every online interaction into an opportunity for impactful connection. And it also means your team can leverage valuable insights, like website traffic and social media engagement metrics, to better understand and target potential customers.

What’s internet marketing?

Internet marketing, also called online or digital marketing, encompasses strategies and techniques to promote products, services, and content over the internet. It uses diverse digital marketing channels like websites and search engines to connect with and captivate target audiences.

As more and more people go online to work, socialize, and interact with the world, internet marketing becomes essential. The good news is that internet marketing tactics, like social media posts or email campaigns, are often less expensive than traditional advertising methods like billboards or TV ads. Marketers can take advantage of these cost-efficient solutions and use real-time analytics to monitor performance across multiple digital platforms. This makes internet marketing a dynamic way for businesses to engage with customers.

Internet marketing vs. traditional advertising

Marketing strategies are evolving from traditional methods to digital approaches. Let’s explore the advantages online advertising offers over conventional marketing:

• Global reach. Internet marketing breaks geographical barriers and helps you reach customers worldwide. With a significant portion of the global population online, businesses can market their products and services to anyone with an internet-enabled device, regardless of location — a common barrier physical stores face. You can use localization and internationalization to make your site engaging to audiences across the globe.
• 24/7 accessibility. Unlike traditional brick-and-mortar stores with fixed operating hours, online businesses operate around the clock. By leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) for personalization and automation, you can engage with customers anytime, enhancing convenience for your business and its audience.
• Precision in targeted advertising. Internet marketing lets you target people with specific demographics, interests, and behaviors with tailored messages. This focused approach helps you address relevant pain points to draw in more leads than traditional advertising. Unlike conventional advertising, which often disperses messages too broadly and misses the mark with uninterested audiences, targeted digital advertising provides the right message to the right audience, which can increase conversion rates.
• Measurable outcomes. Digital marketing solutions encompass tools and platforms that store data online and in analytics tools. These solutions let you track real-time metrics, such as website traffic, conversions, and engagement, so you can measure and refine campaigns with unmatched precision.
• Enhanced brand visibility. Strategies like search engine optimization (SEO) and content marketing boost your online visibility and domain authority, which positions your brand higher on search engine results pages (SERPs). This visibility attracts organic traffic more effectively than conventional marketing methods, broadening your brand’s reach.
• Cost-effectiveness. Internet marketing offers more budget-friendly options than traditional marketing methods like print and television advertising. Digital strategies like email, social media, and content marketing let you allocate resources more efficiently and often drive a higher return on investment (ROI).

9 popular examples of internet marketing

You can adapt internet marketing strategies to all organizational sizes, but some may be more effective than others depending on your industry and objectives. Here are nine internet marketing strategies worth considering.

1. Search engine optimization

SEO boosts a website’s visibility and SERP ranking. By weaving SEO into your internet marketing efforts, such as incorporating relevant keywords into your platform, you’ll draw organic traffic to your site and enhance your brand’s visibility.

Some SEO best practices include using relevant and trending meta tags, keywords, and other metadata to help visitors find what they want. If your business specializes in fitness services, using terms like “best outdoor exercises,” “home fitness tips,” and “how to stay fit” in your content can help your site show up in SERPs when potential readers search for similar queries.

2. Email marketing

Email marketing involves sending emails to engage subscribers, promote products, and nurture customer relationships. By delivering targeted promotions and tailored recommendations directly to subscribers’ inboxes in well-designed email campaigns, email marketing helps to strengthen brand awareness, foster customer loyalty, and drive sales.

Consider a web design agency that boosts leads and site traffic through a monthly email newsletter. This newsletter might include design tips, case studies, and exclusive discounts on their service offerings.

By consistently providing valuable content that subscribers look forward to receiving, the agency establishes itself as a trusted resource in the web design community. This consistency and value create a sense of anticipation and exclusivity among the brand’s audience, which deepens their brand engagement and encourages a sense of belonging and loyalty.

3. Social media advertising

Social media advertising leverages platforms like Facebook and Instagram to target specific demographics with ads and curated content. This strategy stands out for its ability to segment audiences based on detailed criteria, such as interests, behaviors, and demographics, which allows social media marketers to craft highly targeted and resonant campaigns.

A local bookstore might use Facebook ads to connect with book lovers by targeting visitors who’ve shown interest in literary social pages and events. By creating engaging ads that highlight new arrivals and author events, the bookstore precisely reaches people most likely to respond. This approach ensures that market resources go toward engaging audiences most likely to convert, ultimately increasing marketing ROI.

4. Content marketing

Like social media advertising, content marketing focuses on crafting and sharing valuable content like blog posts, articles, and infographics to engage specific audiences. But unlike social media advertising, which is platform-specific, content marketing spans various channels, including websites and apps, to offer a broader reach.

This content strategy excels in helping you establish your brand as an industry authority. Consider a tech company. They might create an in-depth infographic about cybersecurity trends and share it on LinkedIn for professional networking, Instagram with tailored adjustments for visual appeal, and their website to enrich their content library.

Content marketing boosts not only visibility but also audience trust. Whether you’re publishing timely pieces in response to current news and trends, or crafting evergreen content that’s timeless and always relevant, by consistently delivering content that adds value, you enhance your brand’s reputation and appeal. This also increases your domain authority — your site’s credibility and trustworthiness according to search engines — leading to higher search rankings and more organic traffic.

5. Pay-per-click advertising

Pay-per-click (PPC) marketing involves launching targeted ads, selecting specific keywords on search engines and social media platforms, and paying a fee each time users click on an ad. When someone enters a specific query or term, the highest bidder’s ad appears as a top-ranking result, immediately giving them an advantage by driving traffic to their website and other digital channels.

If your business specializes in digital marketing services, for instance, your PPC strategy might involve bidding on keywords like “digital marketing strategies” or “online marketing services” within Google Ads. If you bid high enough, your ad appears at the top of Google search results when potential customers look up these terms. This boosts your site’s visibility and engagement potential.

6. Blogging

Blogging centers on regularly writing and publishing insightful content on a company blog. By crafting blog posts that provide helpful tips, answer common questions, and explore relevant topics, you position your brand as an industry authority.

Beyond building trust, this strategy also fosters strong relationships with your dedicated audience. Engaging content invites readers to interact, share their thoughts, and become regular visitors, transforming them from casual readers into loyal readers.

Optimized blog content also increases visibility on search engines, which draws more organic traffic to your site. As readers engage with your content by spending more time on your pages and sharing your posts, these positive signals to search engines further boost your SEO efforts.

Imagine a gardening supply company that publishes weekly blog posts. Their topics might cover sustainable gardening practices, innovative tools, and step-by-step guides for various planting techniques. Through these efforts, the company not only educates their audience but also establishes their brand as a trusted expert in the gardening community.

7. Influencer marketing

In influencer marketing, businesses partner with well-known personalities and entities within their industry to market their offerings to the influencer’s followers. This strategy taps into the influencer’s credibility, extensive reach, and established audience trust. By working with trusted influencers, brands can enhance their brand visibility and connect with new, receptive audiences.

A fitness apparel company might collaborate with a fitness guru on Instagram to showcase their latest workout gear. Through sponsored content, like posts and videos featuring the influencer wearing the brand’s apparel during workouts, the brand gains exposure to a broader audience of fitness enthusiasts.

8. Video and podcasting

Videos and podcasts are dynamic multimedia content formats that you can distribute across various platforms, including YouTube and Instagram for videos and Spotify and Apple Podcasts for podcasts. These mediums serve as effective channels to connect with your audience on a deeper level. Through videos and podcasts, you can offer insights, entertainment, and information that enrich the audience’s experience.

As your content gains traction, integrating influencers and notable industry figures into podcasts or videos can introduce your brand to broader audiences. A tech company, for instance, could launch a podcast series discussing the latest trends in technology that features interviews with industry experts.

This strategic move demonstrates the company’s active role in shaping and discussing key topics, which can elevate the organization’s status to a thought leader. Such positioning attracts a more engaged audience that values insightful analysis and will likely become brand advocates.

9. Web design

Effective web design focuses on creating websites and landing pages that are visually appealing, user-friendly, and functional. The goal is to guide users toward specific actions, like making a purchase or signing up for a newsletter, and ultimately convert them into customers.

If your website doesn’t meet your target audience’s expectations, leverage data visualization and heatmap tools to make targeted improvements. This data informs strategic adjustments to the site’s layout and user journey.

For a design services company, this might mean observing the user journey to identify improvement areas. Taking this data, the company could redesign their site to showcase their portfolio more effectively, simplify the consultation process, and make the site more responsive to mobile users. These refinements showcase the company’s deep understanding of effective service business marketing by demonstrating their ability to apply design principles in ways that meet user needs and elevate the overall customer experience.

How to implement an effective internet marketing strategy: 3 steps

Whether you’re focusing on a single campaign or juggling multiple projects, here’s how to market your business online with a successful internet marketing strategy in three steps.

1. Establish your objectives

Determine the specific goals you aim to achieve through your internet marketing efforts while considering the resources at your disposal. You might target a 25% uptick in website traffic over the next six months or aim to increase your email subscription list by 15% within the same period.

Whatever your marketing objectives are, explicitly outline these goals and share them with your team. Make sure your goals are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART). By identifying your objectives upfront, you provide a clear road map for your internet marketing strategy that allows you to accurately track and assess progress against your plan.

2. Identify your target audience

An effective strategy requires analyzing your target audience, including their pain points, preferences, and behaviors. This understanding helps you develop detailed buyer personas that represent different segments of your customer base, and you can use these buyer personas to enhance your ability to meet customers’ needs effectively.

Conduct market research, analyze competitors, study existing customer data, and gather insights from surveys and social media to understand your audience’s needs. Before moving to a public release, you can also deploy test marketing and A/B testing to trial your internet marketing campaigns with smaller sample groups. When your internet marketing strategies align with your audience’s interests and motivations, your ROI is higher.

Let’s say you have a food preparation app and usage data reveals that most users close the app if they can’t find high-protein meals they can prepare in 15 minutes or less. By strategically featuring quick and protein-rich meal options in your app and emphasizing their preparation ease in your marketing messages, you cater directly to the preferences of users seeking efficient meal solutions.

3. Choose the right internet marketing strategies

Opt for the internet marketing strategies that best align with your audience’s preferences and your objectives — whether that’s SEO, email marketing, social media advertising, or all of the above. If you aim to educate, leverage blogs and podcasts. But to maximize viral potential, explore influencer marketing and paid social media partnerships.

Consider both your available resources and budget when choosing which strategy to use. And integrating multiple tactics often proves more effective in engaging and converting users. Implement a marketing plan with key performance indicators (KPIs) that you can use to monitor performance and fine-tune your approach for optimal outcomes.

Reach new audiences with Webflow

Whatever your business’s internet marketing strategy might be, no approach is complete without a great website. Every marketing campaign ultimately directs traffic to your site, where its design and usability directly influence visitor conversions.

With Webflow, you can create a site that’s visually appealing and highly functional — ensuring an engaging and captivating experience that converts users.

Build and launch your company’s main site, reach new audiences, and grow your business with Webflow today.