Web marketing is the marketing or promotion of products or services over the Internet. It is also known as internet marketing, e-marketing, online marketing. Web marketing does not only refer to marketing on the Internet, but also includes marketing done via e-mail and wireless media,  using digital customer data and electronic customer relationship management (ECRM) systems.

Web marketing holds together the creative and technical facets of the Internet by including design, development, advertising and sales. Web marketing also refers to the post of media along many different stages of the customer engagement cycle through search engine marketing (SEM), search engine optimization (SEO), banner ads on specific websites, email marketing, mobile advertising, and Web 2.0 strategies.

Web marketing is largely divided into the following types:

• Display advertising: Advertisement using web banners or banner ads placed on a third-party website or blog to drive passage to a company’s own website and boost product awareness.
• Search engine marketing (SEM): It is a type of marketing that looks for promoting websites by increasing their appearance in search engine result pages (SERPs) in the course of the use of either paid assignment, background advertising, and paid enclosure, or using free search engine optimization techniques.
•  Search engine optimization (SEO): It is the practice of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines by the use of the “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results.
• Social media marketing: It is the method of deriving traffic or attention through social media websites such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
• Email marketing:  This type of marketing involves directly marketing by sending a commercial message to a group of people using electronic mail.
• Referral marketing: It is a technique of promoting products or services to new customers through referrals, usually word of mouth.
• Inbound marketing: This type of marketing involves creating and generously sharing informative content by which they can convert prospects into customers and customers into repeat buyers.

Advantages

Web marketing is not so costly relatively to other marketing method, when examining the ratio of cost to the reach of the target audience.

Companies can reach a large number of audiences by spending a small part of traditional advertising budgets.

The nature of the medium of marketing lets consumers research and purchase products and services suitably.

Therefore, businesses have the advantage of attracting to consumers in a medium that can bring results faster. The approach and overall efficacy of marketing campaigns depend on business goals and cost-volume-profit (CVP) analysis.

Web marketers also have the advantage of measuring statistics simply and reasonably. Because almost all aspects of a web marketing campaign can be traced, measured, and tested, in many cases through the use of an ad server.

Limitations

• One of the challenges of the web markets is that many internet products are completely cons or promoted with deception making it complicated to know what one is buying. Especially for the products that are assumed to train or aid internet marketers in making money. Although the quality of products has improved in the past few years, but ethics is still often missing in this marketing. Many so-called money making products like “empty boxes” where is essentially nothing, yet a buyer is to make money by reselling this empty box to others.
• The marketer will not be able to use their x-factor/personal touch factor/human touch factor to persuade the audience to buy their product since the marketing is completely based on the advertisement via websites, blogs, and other channels.