E.marketing

eMarketing is the product of the meeting between modern communication technologies and the age-old marketing principles that humans have always applied. That said, the specifics are reasonably complex and are best handled piece by piece. So we've decided to break it all down and tackle the parts one at a time.

What is the difference and does it matter?

Digital Marketing VS Internet Marketing ?

What is the difference between digital marketing and internet marketing, what is the latest trend in the industry and how do big companies allocate their digital marketing budgets?

Digital Marketing

Digital marketing is a broad term that describes a set of marketing processes that utilize all available digital channels to promote a product or service or build a digital brand. Digital marketing has come to succeed traditional marketing and the transition from paper and newspaper ads to Facebook and PPC campaigns.

The channels that make up digital marketing include: Web sites, Social media platforms, Banner placement, email marketing, mobile marketing, SEO, pay per click campaigns, Web TV, SMS, billboards and anything else with a digital foundation.

Internet Marketing

Internet marketing is a subset of digital marketing. It is in fact the most important component since the majority of digital marketing activities fall within the boundaries of Internet marketing. We will see below how digital marketing budgets are spent and their relationship with Internet marketing.

The major channels of Internet Marketing are:

Web site – Either a personal website or a corporate website or even a personal blog hosted on a shared platform (like WordPress or Tumblr). For many campaigns a website is the starting point and the destination i.e. you run a digital marketing campaign to promote a website (starting point) with the purpose of getting more visitors (destination).

Search Marketing (SEM) – Search Marketing is the basis of Internet Marketing and consists of two important activities, SEO and PSA. There is a lot of confusion about these terms that’s why I wrote separate posts explaining the difference:

You can also see What is the difference between SEO and SEM?

What is the difference between SEO and SEM?

The difference between SEO and SEM is simply that Search Engine Optimization is part of Search engine marketing or Search marketing as it is widely known. Both processes aim in increasing visibility in search engines. SEO is about optimizing the web property to get better rankings in the search results while SEM goes beyond SEO. It involves other methods as well which can get you more search engine visitors like PPC advertising.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

I have explained before what is SEO and why is it important and I have also outlined what in my opinion are the most important SEO tips. For the purpose of doing a comparison between SEO and SEM I will re-state the definition of SEO so that it is clear for everybody what the difference between the two is.

What is SEO?

SEO is the process of optimizing your web site for the purpose of getting free traffic from search engines. An optimized web site is more easily understood by Search engine crawlers, so there are more chances of ranking higher in SERPS.

On-Site and Off-site SEO

There are 2 main pillars of SEO, what is called on-site SEO and off-site SEO. On-Site SEO are rules you can apply on your web site or blog so that it’s more search engine friendly. For example you need to use proper titles, good descriptions, well formatted URLs, correct use of H1, H2 and images and many more.

Off-site SEO refers to the process of getting votes from other web sites for the purpose of increasing your web site’s trust in the eyes of search engines. For beginners this may be confusing but try to think about it like a ranking system where the web site who has the most votes ranks higher. Votes in our case are links coming from other web sites to your site. That is also the reason why off-site SEO is referring to as link building.

To avoid any misunderstandings it’s not only a matter of how many links you have pointing to your website but also from where these links are coming and a number of other factors.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

Search Engine Marketing is over and above SEO but it’s only a subset of your overall Internet Marketing Strategy. The diagram below shows the relationship between Internet Marketing, SEM and SEO. As you can see there are many more ways to increase your web site’s traffic besides SEM and SEO.

What is SEM?

So, SEM is the marketing process with a goal of getting more visibility in search engines either by getting more free traffic (SEO) or paid traffic (Paid search advertising).

Through paid search advertising you essentially buy advertising space in the search engine results. So instead of trying to rank higher and get free traffic you pay to appear in front of the searches.

The most well-known advertising agency for PSA is Google Adwords. Through Google adwords you can get your ads appear in the Google search results and you pay only for the clicks on your ads. This is also the reason why the whole process is called Pay-per-click or PPC. Bing and Yahoo have a similar system but it not so successful and widely known as Adwords.

Importance of SEM Traffic

SEM traffic is considered the most important source of Internet traffic because it is targeted. It is widely accepted that people use the search engines to find a solution to a problem, an answer to their question or to learn how to do something. So when searches click on a web site from the search results or click on an ad, they are more likely to convert. The relevancy of the displayed web sites and ads makes SEM traffic more valuable than any of the other sources. Facebook and twitter are trying to optimize their advertising platforms to utilize targeted traffic but still traffic coming directly from search engines has a better ROI.

You can also see Digital Marketing VS Internet Marketing ?

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