In this article we will indicate the major online marketing channels, each of which has its own rules and tools. A brief summary, we see that online marketing is divided into 8 main channels, 9 if you include when you use offline marketing to promote our actions online.
1. Search Engine Marketing (SEM): The main objective of the SEM or search engine marketing to increase visibility in search results from search engines by including ads that are paid when the user clicks (pay per click or CPC). Major search engines have their own platforms for managing the advertising, even as the country may change. The main platforms are Google AdWords SEM, Yahoo Search Marketing (YSM), Microsoft Advertising, and Ask, with AdWords and YSM in Spain important.
2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO): The objective of SEO is to improve the position in our pages displayed in the natural results that show the searchers to certain searches. In this case the users click the results do not imply any cost to businesses, but not mean they are free, because in a competitive market need to hire SEO specialists to achieve good positions.
Importantly, we show featured only a “handful” of keywords, while in the advertising we display our ads on tens of thousands of keywords, and it just fell through the SEO after months of hard work, so if you need fast results and will resort to permanently SEM is advisable to combine both strategies to avoid losing market share in search of our products.
3. Display ads or Rich Media: Here you can group all the ads that we see in online media, although for example Google AdWords network includes display in most of the media that is managed from within Google AdWords. Such advertising includes all types of formats commonly called banners (static or dynamic images, flah, video ads, interactive ads,…)
4. E-Mail: E-Mail marketing is a strategy that the e-mail becomes a powerful marketing tool to get instant results, that well managed allows very advanced segmentation. It is important to differentiate what is a good e-mail marketing (periodic communications strategy and targeted at users to send personalized offers really interested) of the mass mailings of e-mail spam that could scratch or in many cases are really annoying as it may offer to our customers products that are not interested, already have or a higher price than they bought, what comes to be a good definition of “Anti Marketing.”
5. Partners and Sponsors: Affiliate programs are the dream of any sales, allowing to have a wide commercial network (websites with all its possibilities) that are paid only if they meet the objectives set (eg by sales or lead generation). For sponsorships are an excellent tool to generate brand image, especially after a study web analytics we see what are the best places to sponsor a particular web service.
6. Directories: The specialized directories, but in general, and with few exceptions tend to have low traffic volume, are excellent for public address an industry niche that interests us. Directories come in all types and in our product or service must select the mix that most interested us (subject directories, local search, price comparison, etc.)
7. Social Media Marketing (SMM): In boom since the birth of YouTube, Twitter and Facebook, but not unique to these platforms as there are dozens of tools to be handled for a successful SMM (blogs, communities, content aggregators, etc..) Additionally, there are advertising opportunities and promotional tools to highlight our presence and products in these social networks.
8. Social Media Optimization (SMO): This is the optimization in online social networks or online social media positioning through participation in the talks, creating profiles, adding content to them, etc.
9. Offline media: Here we gather all the shares in traditional media (from print, radio, TV or events… even our business cards, etc…) that we use to promote and launch our online marketing efforts.
