Some Hard Facts About Online Marketing

© March Oyinki 2016

Online marketing provides businesses with readily available audience and a large array of channels that allow you to promote your products and services. There are many success stories of businesses that have made a wind fall from online marketing, and so also are there many cases of woeful failures.

Online marketing in simple terms means advertising and promoting your products and services on the internet. By definition, it is the use of marketing software applications, such as social media channels and email to promote, advertise and market your corporate brand identity, and products and services on the internet.

According to Invespro, global online retail sales for 2016 hit $1.888 trillion and a growth rate of 7.4% with a projection of $2,489 trillion and estimated growth 8.8% in 2018. United States is eight on the list of countries with the most online retail sales, with countries like china and United Kingdom occupying second and first places with 12.0% and 14.4% growth rates respectively. In Africa, Nigeria tops the online retail sales with 2.3%, followed closely by Kenya 2.0% and Algeria 1.6%.

The online marketplace avails users with different methods of marketing their products and services. There is the option of marketing by email, often called email marketing, and we also have online merchandising, pay-per-click, network marketing and affiliate marketing channels. These marketing channels have one basic objective, and they are primarily to stimulate interest and entice customers to make that online purchase.

The questions you want to ask are, how effective are these channels, and how much work and time do you have to put to make them work and how much funds do you need to commit to achieve results? If you have answers to these questions, you are likely to find somewhere in the answers the reason why marketing experts say that there are no easy ways to achieving online marketing success.

Successful online marketing depends largely on the target audience, the marketing channels and of course the product itself. You really require a wide audience as out of every 200 views of your promotional advert, it has been statistically proven that you are likely to get no more than one click, and to get just one willing buyer, you are required to generate another 200 clicks, meaning that your product much reach at least 40,000 people for you to make a successful sales.

This same reason is why it is very difficult for businesses that are not using paid services of already established marketing channels such as Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the Affiliate Marketing channels, can hardly succeed on their own. Most businesses are unable to drive sufficient traffic to their sites to make the required sales figure that they expect.

Engaging the services of these established marketing channels that have the audience and capacity to drive traffic to your site is costly, and you are still not guaranteed sales. All they can do is help to drive traffic to you site. Many business owners have spent invested much on online advertising and have nothing to show for it in terms of sales. Just being online does not guarantee sales, neither does online promotion guarantee sales.

It depends mostly on the size of the audience, advertising medium or marketing channel, and product branding and product quality. Often times, business owners try on their own to use social media platforms to promote their products and services without actually using the paid advertising plans available in these social media platforms, and they end up wasting time and effort and at the end of the day, they fail to make any sales.

Just because you have a website for your products and services does not mean you will start making online sales. There are certain minimum requirements. Your site must be light, navigable, that is, it must be user friendly, and must have a clear and simply product display or list, competitive pricing and quality service or goods. The site must also have a merchant account for payment in the currency in which you expect to be paid. It must also have a secure site stamp from a reputable organization to guarantee that the customer can trust your site. There must be a live chat and 24/7 customer care phone number on the site.

It is at this point it can be said that you have setup a workable website for your business. All these still does not guarantee instant online sales, if as mention earlier, you do not have the required large following online to support your in-house marketing efforts, whether it is on social media, email or affiliate marketing channels. The hard fact is that even with all these in place, and you use paid online marketing platforms, your sales expectations are still hanging in the balance – 50/50.

No advertiser will ever offer you a sales guarantee, all they can do is to ensure that your promotion gets to the target audience and in the numbers that your advertising budget covers. It a very dicey situation, that is why organizations that understand these principles, tread carefully not to get entangled in the marketplace on the web.
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