Online marketing may be a big part of a broader marketing approach that includes other things like direct marketing or traditional press advertising, or in many cases, it may be the only kind of marketing you do. For many businesses who only offer their products and services online, the effectiveness of their internet marketing is literally the difference between success and failure, because without good online marketing they have no other way to reach their target audience.
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To keep any marketing strategy working at its best you need to keep reviewing and tweaking it, and this is especially true of online marketing. Here is why:
Moving Goalposts
Online marketing can involve all kinds of approaches, methods and platforms, such as blogging, SEO building, and social media marketing. These are all proven, highly effective ways to reach people that when used well and in the right mix can bring you great results. However, they are also methods that involve the use of technology that is changing constantly, and in ways outside of your control.
What Works in SEO Can Change Rapidly
Google changes algorithms used in its search engine all the time, so SEO techniques that were once effective for you may suddenly stop yielding results, or you may even be penalized by Google in the search rankings for using once accepted methods of link building that they have now adapted their algorithms to punish. Google do this to provide the best possible results to its users, so their aim is to catch out unnatural links or bad content that has been created simply for marketing purposes. While you should never use approaches that involve anything other than good quality, relevant content posted in useful places to build links anyway, the best ways to do this in line with how Google works at a given time will vary.
Social Media Is Constantly Evolving
As well as changes to Google to keep you on your toes, social media evolves all the time too. New social networks gain popularity and become relevant in marketing terms, meaning you want to consider adding them to your strategy, and the big platforms like Facebook and Twitter change, making some practices more or less effective than before or introducing new advertising options. As an example, having a business Facebook page with a lot of likes used to be marketing gold, but these days, because Facebook now heavily filters people’s news feeds, a lot of content posted by business pages doesn’t get seen by most of the pages followers, making paid advertising the only real way to effectively market on Facebook.
As you can imagine, the kind of changes that occur on the internet quite regularly and with little warning can massively alter how well your online marketing strategy performs, so you really need to review it with a professional internet marketing agency, or become expert and up to date enough to review it yourself, at least once a year.