Internet marketing

Internet marketing, also referred to as i-marketing, web-marketing, online-marketing or e-Marketing, is the marketing of products or services over the Internet.

The Internet has brought media to a global audience. The interactive nature of Internet marketing in terms of providing instant responses and eliciting responses are the unique qualities of the medium. Internet marketing is sometimes considered to be broad in scope because it not only refers to marketing on the Internet, but also includes marketing done via e-mail and wireless media. Management of digital customer data and electronic customer relationship management (ECRM) systems are also often grouped together under internet marketing.

Internet marketing ties together creative and technical aspects of the Internet, including: design, development, advertising, and sales.

Internet marketing also refers to the placement of media along many different stages of the customer engagement cycle through search engine marketing (SEM), search engine optimization (SEO), banner ads on specific websites, e-mail marketing, and Web 2.0 strategies. In 2008, The New York Times - working with comScore - published an initial estimate to quantify the user data collected by large Internet-based companies. Counting four types of interactions with company websites in addition to the hits from advertisements served from advertising networks, the authors found the potential for collecting data upward of 2,500 times on average per user per month.

Internet marketing is associated with several business models:
* E-commerce – In this model, goods are sold directly to consumers (B2C) or businesses (B2B) or consumer to consumer(c2c)
* Lead-based Websites – Strategy where an organization generates value by acquiring sales leads from its website
* Affiliate Marketing – The process in which a product or service developed by one entity (e-commerce business, single person, or a combination) is sold by other active sellers for a share of profits. The entity of the product may provide some marketing material (sales letter, affiliate link, tracking facility), however, the vast majority of affiliate marketing relationships come from e-commerce businesses that offer affiliate programs.
* Local Internet Marketing – Strategy through which a small company utilizes the Internet to find and nurture relationships that are to be used for real-world advantage. Local Internet marketing uses tools such as social media marketing, local directory listing,[2] and targeted online sales promotions.
* Blackhat Marketing – This is a form of Internet marketing that employs deceptive, abusive, or less than truthful methods to drive web traffic to a website or affiliate marketing offer. This method sometimes includes spam, cloaking within search engine result pages, or routing users to pages they didn't initially request.

One-to-one approach

The targeted user is typically browsing the Internet alone therefore the marketing messages can reach them personally. This approach is used in search marketing, where the advertisements are based on search engine keywords entered by the users.

And now with the advent of Web 2.0 tools, many users can interconnect as "peers."
Appeal to specific interests

Internet marketing and geo marketing places an emphasis on marketing that appeals to a specific behavior or interest, rather than reaching out to a broadly defined demographic. "On- and Offline" marketers typically segment their markets according to age group, gender, geography, and other general factors. Marketers have the luxury of targeting by activity and geolocation. For example, a kayak company can post advertisements on kayaking and canoeing websites with the full knowledge that the audience has a related interest.

Internet marketing differs from magazine advertisements, where the goal is to appeal to the projected demographic of the periodical, but rather the advertiser has knowledge of the target audience — people who engage in certain activities (e.g., uploading pictures, contributing to blogs)— so the company does not rely on the expectation that a certain group of people will be interested in its new product or service.

Geo-targeting

Geo targeting (in Internet marketing) and geo marketing are the methods of determining the geolocation (the physical location) of a website visitor with geolocation software, and delivering different content to that visitor based on his or her location, such as country, region/state, city, metro code/zip code, organization, Internet Protocol (IP) address, ISP or other criteria.

Source:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_marketing