Online Marketing: 2 Sides of the Coin

In today’s highly competitive marketplace, Online Marketing is one of the most effective ways to grow your business. In the recent past, this amazing marketing methodology has helped small scale industries and various start-ups across several domains, to succeed and to capture their audience.

In order to increase your exposure on web, there is a need to leverage SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and SEM (Search Engine Marketing ) strategies according to your business needs.

Basically Search Engine Marketing along with Search Engine Optimization are some of those techniques that can create a deep impact on your audience regarding your product. Therefore, there is an immense need to wisely use these techniques and methods.

Steps to Online Marketing Success

The initial step that has to be taken in this regard is “Research”. To study market and marketplace is a necessity. This will in turn help you to understand the competition.

If you really want to be a leader, you will have to bring something unique, something different from the league that can draw the attention of your customers. You must know the characteristics of your market and market audience, their needs and demands and then probably you can make a strategy to package your products, in a way that brings value to your customers.

The second thing that should be kept in mind is that you need to work hard on your web appearance. No matter, how good your product or service is, if in case your appearance on the web is dull, you are lost.

You need to design your website in an optimized way, keeping three things in mind: Market (Your Audience), Sales Process and Search Engines. You should never compromise in utilizing the top notch technology when planning for an effective web presence.

With these measures, you can effectively develop a positive brand image of your services or products and can take a dive in the pool of success.

But this is just one side of the coin.

The Ugly Face of Online Marketing

When we are indulged into the talks of publicity of your brand you should also be aware of the fact that this same tool, so called as “Online Marketing”, can also be used for negative publicity and can destroy your image all in one go. As your every competitor is in the mood of utilizing this technique to capture the market, they are also planning strategies to create negative publicity for your brand.

In the recent times, this ugly face of your competitors have emerged wherein they are using fake social Ids and accounts to post negative comments about your products or services.

The thing to understand here is that, today you are not just doing business, you are fighting a war with all your competitors and the bitter reality is that, everything is fair in this war. Several times these techniques of posting negative comments from dummy/fake social accounts have eventually helped them to pen down their biggest competitors.

So, now if this is the problem statement, biggest question is…

What Can Be The Solution?

One simple solution is to remain true to your promises. What it means is that do not brag about things that you do not provide. Stay relevant about your services and features in your products, highlight things that you provide, never mention anything that is potentially not present in your services or products.

By staying truthful to your promises, your competitors will never have any chance to just brag as in that case you will have proof to prove them wrong.

Another thing that can be adopted here is that, you can add a complain area in your website where your customers can provide complains and grievance. But this complain area, should be taken as a serious feedback by company and no stone should be left unturned to resolve their grievance. Remember, troubled customer is a great business opportunity as this gives us new ideas to expand and improvise the business services.

So, what I wanted to convey here was that when planning a strategy to use Online marketing for your business, there is a need to look on the other factor also. There is a need to plan a strategy to tackle with negative publicity, genuine or non-genuine, but it should be pre-planned, so that you can succeed to leave a positive impact on your audience.

[This article is written by Vaishnavi Agrawal a content writer whose works have have been published on various sites related to Hadoop Training, Big Data, Business Intelligence, Cloud Computing, IT, SAP, Project Management and more. Read more about her in the author profile below]