Internet Marketing

Internet marketing, also referred to as i-marketing, web marketing, online marketing, or eMarketing, is the marketing products or services over the Internet. The Internet has brought many unique benefits to marketing, one of which being lower costs for the distribution of information and media to a global audience.

The interactive nature of Internet marketing, both in terms of providing instant response and eliciting responses, is a unique quality of the medium. Internet marketing is sometimes considered to have a broader scope because it not only refers to digital media such as the Internet, e-mail, and wireless media; however, Internet marketing also includes management of digital customer data and electronic customer relationship management (ECRM) systems.


Internet marketing also refers to the placement of media along 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. The New York Times working with com Score 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.


The targeted user is typically browsing the Internet alone, so 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 user. And now with the advent of Web 2.0 tools, many users can interconnect as "peers". Internet marketing and geo marketing places an emphasis on marketing that appeals to a specific behaviour or interest, rather than reaching out to a broadly-defined demographic. "On- and Off-line" 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 canoing websites with the full knowledge that the audience has a related interest. A typical example for different content by choice in geo targeting is the FedEx website at FedEx.com where users have the choice to select their country location first and are then presented with different site or article content depending on their selection