As consumers have moved their presence to the internet, marketing has changed over the past 20 years from traditional mass media to online marketing. Today, half of our global population are internet users, which has made the internet the biggest existing marketing platform. There are many possibilities hiding in online marketing for businesses, as it enables a two-way dialogue between companies and their customers, and gives marketers a possibility to reach masses of people in real time.

In this thesis the aim is to get an understanding of these existing possibilities of online marketing for businesses. To figure out how a business can take advantage of them, the goal of this thesis is to produce an online visibility plan for an event planning start-up. This enables testing and evaluating the theory in practice to get more accurate results. Research based development is used in this thesis to change the current situation of the case company, by systematically answering questions and problems with theoretical and justifiable information.

For a start-up business, the question to be answered first is “how to make a business visible online”. This problem is approached from two perspectives. First with theory by conceptualizing online marketing in the 21st century, and then with an online visibility plan for the case company, based on previous literature and best practices from marketing theories, influencers and competitors. In the end, the findings are analyzed to get an idea on how to increase business online visibility.

Taking business advantage of the internet and implementing the online marketing best practices to the case company have resulted positively regarding online visibility and the increase of sales and inquiries. With effectively integrating search engine optimization (SEO), social media and content actions, one can efficiently fulfill the new customer expectations for ease of discovery, consumption and sharing online.