Well, in a word, yes.

It doesn’t matter what type of business you are or how you operate. If your clients are online, or will be, then online marketing will be right for you.

But, how do you choose what types to participate in? How do you know which will be the most effective?

Start out by asking these questions:

• What are my businesses goals?
• What are our marketing goals? (Branding? Lead Generation? Sales?)
• Who is your target demographic?
• Who is your target customer? (For example: Married, middle aged women, living in Victoria, BC, Canada, who likes to sew)

These are just examples of some of the questions you need to ask. From here you’ll need to do some research as to where your users are and what areas of online marketing are the most effective for reaching your target market. Without taking the time to determine each of these items you’ll really be floundering and that wont’ be good for anyone!

My personal opinion is that you should probably do all types of marketing for the best customer reach, but if you have a limited budget it’s best to figure out the best ways to spend that money effectively. In online marketing the old saying “you have to spend money to make money” couldn’t be more true. But, some people just “spend money”, don’t do that!

Types of online marketing:

Email

Everyone loves to hate email marketing and it comes with that ugly tag “SPAM”. But, not all email marketing is SPAM and there are several things you can do to not come across as “spammy”. It’s about permission marketing, market to the people who are actually interested. Don’t annoy people who aren’t interested in your product, why would you want to market to them anyway? Don’t waste money!

Search Engine Marketing

My favourite! Search engine marketing covers both SEO (natural/organic listings) and SEM/PPC (paid/sponsored). While SEO is considered free, it’s really not. It requires a lot of work, either yours or your agency’s, and even when you have the results, they can quickly change. SEO is great for branding and shows a lot of credibility for your business.

Paid search, as the name implies, is not free and if it’s done ineffectively it can be very costly. Many companies have “dabbled” in paid search and learned a hard lesson, it’s not easy! But, when done well and correctly it can be very effective and help grow your company’s margin, user base and brand recognition.

Social Media

Social Media covers a lot of different areas, you can check out my blog post here for more details. From Blogging, to Facebook, to Twitter and Digg, it’s all considerd “social media”. I see it more as a way to strengthen your brand, network and keep up with your competition than  a sales or lead generation medium, but that doesn’t hurt it’s credibility or effectiveness!

Other/More

Oh, of course there’s more, so, so, so much more. But, this is only one blog post. Stay tuned for more!

So, as I said above, online marketing is right for your business. The question you need to ask is what type of online marketing is right and most effective?

Click it!

CC