For some time now, internet marketing has been viewed as the future of advertising, but there are some internet marketing limitations that everyone has to deal with.
Whilst online advertising is a great way to reach a large number of people at very low cost, being aware of it’s limitations can help you target your online marketing campaigns better and get you more business.
One of the biggest limitations with the internet is that people have come to view it in a similar way to the television—they want to watch what they want and nothing else. Just like people tend to make drinks or visit the bathroom during commercials on TV, no one really wants to pay attention to advertisements online. This means that you have to be almost sneaky in the way you advertise.
Many online marketing techniques rely on getting other people to post links or graphics that connect to your site from their sites. This link exchange works fairly well if you don’t mind having a part of your site dedicated to hosting reciprocal links. These other sites don’t want to link to you without you linking back, after all! The problem here is that a few links or graphics don’t look to bad, but when you start getting dozens of them, it can make your site look a mess!
Another of these internet marketing limitations concerns search engines. Search engines rank your site according to how well they perceive it to match the user’s query. It’s not an exact science, but it has to do with what words you have in your title, metadata, and in the text on your site itself.
You might have heard about these keywords or about SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation. That’s one of the most popular buzz words on the internet today, and everyone seems to want their site optimised. The theory is that SEO is a way of using keywords a certain number of times on your site so that search engines will consistently rank it very high because of its relevance.
The limit here is that writing for search engines means you’re not writing for the actual people visiting your site. If your page is too heavy on keywords, it just won’t read naturally and may not be that informative. Readers are becoming more and more sensitive to poorly written SEO sites, and most click off the sites they find too keyword-heavy.
A different online limitation is that sometimes, people simply won’t sign up for your email list. Whilst in-store, you will always have a chance to explain more or give something extra to persuade customers to sign up, it can be hard to really push your marketing list on your website. On the other hand, though, the people who do sign up for your email list online are generally more likely to become customers simply because they are already very interested in what you are offering.
These limitations are just a few issues you may run into when working on your online marketing strategy, but they can all be overcome with a little work and creativity. Plus, whatever the limitations of internet marketing may be, remember that your information is still reaching many, many people – and, if it’s well written and relevant to your target audience, it will always get ranked by the search engines.