Marketing can be defined as “whatever you do to promote and grow your business” including market research, advertising, publicity, sales, merchandising and distribution. With traditional marketing techniques all of these things are delivered in print format or in person. Internet marketing however, uses the power of online networks and interactive media to reach your marketing objectives… no paper, no telephone calls, no in–person appearances.

Marketing has evolved from general advertising through commercials targeted to specific customer segments (e.g. the youth market) to today´s direct marketing through a variety of channels including letters, telephone calls, and SMS messages.

Traditionally, companies have tried to sell more to their customers through advertising and direct marketing. These are useful tools and they are not about to disappear. Direct marketing, where it uses real customer insights gathered over an extended relationship with the customer, can be particularly effective because of it´s high relevance to the consumer. However, indiscriminate direct advertising whether through direct mailings, promotions on the website, or through other channels, is increasingly perceived as a nuisance and substantially lowers the customer´s loyalty.

Mainstream marketing is still operating on fairly coarse customer clusters with limited ability to target fine segments or predict the behaviour of small groups. This increases campaign costs as unnecessarily large campaigns are executed or reduces sales because the right customers are not be reached with the right offers.

Additionally, marketing typically only operates on contacts from the company to the consumer. Many organisations have thousands of contacts from existing and prospective customers each day but, apart from perhaps the web, these contacts are not consistently treated as a targeted sales opportunity. Ideally you should aim to use traditional marketing tools alongside electronic marketing.

traditional marketing would include:

• print advertising
• leaflet distribution
• posters
• postcards
• stickers & promotional goods
• pamphlets/brochures
• media/press releases, launches and/or features
• advertising – print publications and radio

electronic marketing would include:

• banner advertising
• direct marketing
• email newsletters
• online communities
• bid–gap management
• e–branding
• online newsletters
• rich media
• digital brochures
• e–business strategies
• integrated marketing campaigns
• opt–in/double top-in mailing lists
• organic search engine management
• XML & paid inclusions
• pay–per–click (PPC) search engine management
• website traffic analysis
• research and analysis

You should establish what your selling points are and build up a database of good examples. Your website address should be on everything you produce.

You may want to write articles about your project or interesting aspects of the project for relevant publications, either printed or online. You are always entitled to include a URL in your author details for pieces about your project or any other areas of work you are involved in.

One of the most positive ways your website URL will get distributed is by “viral” marketing, or word–of–mouth marketing. This will happen if your resources are accessible, interesting and user friendly and also if your site is well designed.