Online marketing – the new frontier in marketing

Marketing of products and services over the internet is known as online marketing.  However, the concept is much wider and includes marketing both in the internet and digital media. 

Internet marketing involves technical and creative aspects of internet and includes designing, developing, advertising and selling.  Online marketing makes use of media, internet and digital device, along the stages of customer engagement through search engine optimization, search engine marketing, banner advertisements on affiliate websites, mobile advertising, content marketing etc. 

Internet marketing includes designing the website for the company, search engine optimization, social media websites, affiliate marketing, email marketing etc.

Online marketing is associated with several business models

• ECommerce – in this model services and goods are sold both directly to consumers and businesses or from consumer to consumer using networked computers.
• Lead based – in this tool, an organization generates value acquiring leads about sales from the    website. 
• Affiliate marketing – in this process a service or product conceptualized or developed by one is sold by another website on profit sharing basis.  The company that owns the product may provide some marketing material, such as affiliate links, sales letters etc. 
• There is the one to one model in which online marketing companies target users who are browsing the internet alone so that their message reach out to the users personally.
• Another approach of online marketing is appealing to the specific interests of internet users.  In this type of approach online marketing companies put emphasis on targeting a specific behavior or interest of people rather than trying to reach out to a broadly, but the vaguely defined section of people.  This is done by behavioral targeting which uses patterns of behavior of internet users and throw up content in search results which are consistent with the behavior and tastes of the internet users.  The behavioral pattern can be obtained from tools like cookies. 
• Another method is contextual advertising in which advertisements are placed on the subject that the user is searching on.
• The other type of marketing is niche marketing in which a bunch of customers is identified so that you can target them efficiently.