The era of online advertising and marketing is here! Any business that is serious about maximizing its sales revenue and leveraging cost cannot dispute this fact. The medium of the internet as a marketing tool is fast becoming a preferred choice for many businesses around the world.

Still new and with the potential to generate leads at a relatively lower expense, many small businesses especially find it the best practical option for building up their customer base, increase sales and ultimately establish a profitable business.

In this article, we look at three main online advertising and marketing options that are currently in use by businesses to achieve the above listed objectives. They include search engine marketing, content marketing, social media marketing and email marketing.

Search Engine Marketing

Search engine marketing is the most popular of all the online marketing strategies available now. Most businesses are able to generate more traffic from this area more than any other form of marketing avenues.

There are two main types of search traffic, namely; organic search and paid search. In both areas, Google dominates the space with about 67 percent market share in the United States and about 90% in most parts of the world. Bing is the second largest search engine platform in the world, followed by Yahoo. However, in certain areas such as China and Russia, Baidu and Yandex reign in their respective countries.

Content Marketing

Content marketing is one of the most important online marketing strategies. We have all heard of the phrase “Content Is King”. If you provide services in marketing, your content marketing efforts will focus on blog posts that explore topics that relate to your services. Content may be created in different formats including text, images, video and animations.

Search engines places great value on content. If you want to get great benefits from search engine marketing, then content creation must be on top of your priority list. Three words must be central focus when creating content for the web; uniqueness, relevance and usefulness.

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is relatively new compared to the other forms of online marketing. Social media marketing has grown in so much popularity over the last decade. Millions of internet users are flocking to social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Plus and Pinterest.

These users have made them a viable online marketing option for any business that wants to create brand awareness, increase traffic and customer base, generate sales and build relationships.