Online marketing has been moving forward at a rate not many people expected.
It was not until a few years ago that advertising online was considered a niche channel, that uses only a fraction of marketing resources and budget.
Today, it’s a multi billion industry that is constantly growing and becoming more and more important in every marketer’s activity portfolio. It offers every business, small or large, offline or online, some marketing opportunities that cannot be found in the offline world. Here are some of the more interesting marketing opportunities you can only find online.
Social media
Social media advertising embodies a huge marketing opportunity to both online and offline businesses. It has some unique characteristics that cannot be found anywhere else. First of all, social media offers an unprecedented view to people’s lives. People provide social media channels with a huge amount of information about their lives.
It’s not just their age, gender or place of residence that they reveal. It’s their hobbies, social interactions, profession, likes, dislikes and much more. This information allows online marketers to approach users with a tailored offer that is highly suited to their needs and wants.
This also allows online marketers to save money on their marketing campaigns, as they can launch focused campaigns to their target audience. Social media also offers a direct channel to potential and existing customers. You can interact with your customers and communicate with them directly via your Facebook page, Twitter account or Instagram.
Viral marketing
if you’re smart and know how to use the internet to your advantage, you can reach a huge audience with very little effort and budget. Viral marketing uses people’s need to share in order to spread the word about a brand, a product or an event. Use the right message, wrap it up in the right video, image or story and you can reach hundreds, thousands and even millions of people just by going viral.
Giveaways and Bonuses
Giveaway was not invented on the internet. Many stores offer their customers special sales and promotions where they can buy one product and get the second one for free or for half the price. But the online world has taken giveaways and bonuses to the next level and offers saving opportunities you can only find online.
Take for example the online casino industry. Land based casinos lure their customers by offering them an experience that exceeds gambling. They offer high quality dining, extravagant shows and a general prestigious ambiance. Online casinos cannot offer their players the atmosphere you get at a real gaming floor, but they have found other ways to attract their potential customers. One of the most successful ways is the welcome bonus.
Welcome bonuses are offered to new players when they sign up to the online casino and deposit money to their account. For every dollar they deposit the new players receive a bonus from the casino. It can be a match 100% bonus, which means that for every dollar they deposit to their account they receive a bonus of a dollar, it can be a 50% match bonus which will give them 0.5 dollar for every dollar they deposit.
The terms of each bonus are different from one online casino to the other. But it has one common characteristic – you receive money to your account. Since we all love getting free money, the welcome bonuses are a huge attraction to potential players.
Another interesting giveaway in the casino industry is the free games options. Many online casinos or even gaming portals offer free games to players. Once playing players are offered the chance to switch to real money games. They don’t have to do that, but the appeal is obvious. Take for example roulettepractice.co.uk. You can play roulettepractice.co.uk free roulette for as long as you wish. But they also offer real money roulette. It’s up to you to decide if you want to make the switch from free to real money games.
Banner ads
Banner ads appear at the top, bottom and side of the screen when you visit certain websites. These banner ads are just like digital billboards. The major difference between a banner ad and a billboard in the offline world is that the banner ad can be targeted to you specifically.
It will use data from the cookies that your browser collects to create an advert that is likely to be relevant to you. So if you visit an online store looking for a tablet then your banner ads are likely to be for tablets. This cannot be done in the offline world because billboards are simply not capable of displaying a different image to the hundreds of thousands of people that walk past them every day.
