Internet Marketing
Internet Business Services and e-Commerce
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MultiMedia Internet Marketing has a proven track record in
helping businesses achieve success on the Internet and a measurable return on
their online investments. We are now recognized as one of the leading online
marketing consultancies in Romania.
Marketing Strategy
Besides
the worldwide possibilities, we dispose of our own great
resources
to promote your products, services, web site or image.
Advertise Your Site Everywhere
Its Your Company & Products - Brag about it !
Once your site is up and running your site address and E-mail addresses should
be publicized wherever possible. This is one area that must be completed
internally by your company. You want people to know where your Web Site is and
how to contact your company via E-mail (a most economical and convenient
method).
Remember, however, that your Web Site should be kept up to date and offer the
visitors information and function. Simply keeping a "Frequently Asked
Question" or "Technical Support" page can be a considerable
benefit at times. These may also bring traffic to your site.
Here is where your Site URL and E-mail addresses should be posted and
advertised.
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Stationary and business cards.
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Company brochures and product descriptions.
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Product Flyers.
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All Media Advertising TV, radio, billboards, newspaper, magazine.
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Internet Classifieds
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Investor and Shareholder reports.
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Any FAX Transmissions.
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As a Signature on all company E-mail.
Online Marketing is
marketing on the Internet. It is a type of e-marketing, which in turn is a type
of e-commerce. While at first the confusion of experiemnts, beta versions of
websites, search engines and other online devices cause marketers to consider
this world of the Internet unknowable and perhaps too unpredictable, there is
now a growing body of work to which marketers are now paying attention in order
to develop online marketing programs. The most known tools to marketers in the
mid 2000s are currently tools grouped into 2 fields: online advertising and
search engine optimization. E-marketing tools used to drive visitors to a
web site include:
However, marketing online is simply not offline
marketing applied to a new online world. Online marketing has a slightly
different character and purpose as indicated in such seminal works as The
cluetrain manifesto, Purple cow, Permission marketing, and other texts of smaller nature compiled in
blogs and news sites.
Purpose of Online Marketing
When marketing online, the general four step
process of marketing is still the guiding idea, in the online world the
character of marketing becomes more deeply a conversation between a marketer and
a market-of-one a concept that is central to The cluetrain manifesto. In such a role as a communicator, the online
marketer is in a position to build awareness of her/his company or business in
more personal terms than otherwise, and in so doing enables a more human
conversation. Such conversations tend to be more warts and all and should
establish confidence of the potential purchaser in the potential vendor.
Smith and Chaffey (2001) claim that Internet
technology can be used to focus marketing on the
customer, while at the same time linking to other business operations so as
to achieve profitability. This can be done by:
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Anticipating - the Internet provides
an additional channel by which customers can access information and make
purchases - understanding this demand is key to governing resource
allocation to e-marketing. For example, low-cost airline easyJet (http://www.easyjet.com)
has an online revenue contribution of over 90% since demand for a
standardised product online is so high.
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Satisfying - a key success factor in
e-marketing is achieving customer satisfaction through the electronic
channel, this raises issues such as is the site easy to use, does it perform
adequately, what is the standard of associated customer service and how are
physical products dispatched?
Detractors of this concept of human-to-human
contact through online conversations suggest that companies are going to be
careful about marketing in this manner and perhaps will never really have honest
and open conversations as the interests of companies and businesses are not the
interests of potential purchasers.
The cluetrain manifesto allows for this type of thinking suggesting that
businesses when marketing in this manner need to be thinking about more than
just making money; if a business is thinking only about making money, it will
become apparent in close online conversations and the market will treat that
business in whatever manner it may as markets can now talk to each other through
the same means marketers talk to potential customers.
Online Marketing Activities
Smith and Chaffey (2001) describe five key online
marketing activities (the '5Ss') which can be applied by an organisation to
immplement various online marketing tactics. For example, for an e-newsletter,
the 5Ss are:
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Sell - Grow sales (the e-newsletter
often acts as both a customer acquisition tool and a retention tool - the
lastminute.com e-newsletter has this dual role)
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Serve - Add value (give customers
extra benefits online such as an online exclusive offer or more in-depth
information about your products or the industry sector)
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Speak - Get closer to customers by
creating a dialogue, asking questions through online research surveys and
learning about customers' preferences through tracking - which content are
people most interested in.
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Save - Save costs (of print and post
if you have a traditional offline e-newsletter can you reduce print runs or
extend it to those customers you can't afford to communicate with)
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Sizzle - Extend the brand online. A
newsletter keeps the brand 'front-of-mind' and helps reinforce brand values.
Added value can also be delivered by the e-newsletter by informing and
entertaining customers.
Capturing attention of potential customers can be
as simple as advertising using some of the new advertising tools the online
world provides, such as advertising on search engines, but it can also be about
configuring more remarkable methods that tend to spread across many sites and
capturing the imagination of many people in the process. There are at least
three major configurations of links and tools that have been used to capture
attention online: funnel building, buzz marketing and cool tools.
One of the best illustrations of building a sales
funnel is provided by
Alex Designs (http://alexdesigns.com/).
Building a sales funnel requires working with
search engine optimization, email newsletter distribution, discussion board
entries, advertisements, affiliate activities and more. In fact, any way that
additional links can be provided so that a potential customer can begin a
conversation with a business, is educated about that business'
products/services, or is provided with concepts and propositions that will
eventually lead to a sale. A funnel is usually laid down over time and is the
result of continuous activity of marketers in online activities.
Buzz marketing tends to be a much quicker process and tends to involve less
activity on behalf of marketers and requires attention of people online to
spread by word-of-mouth, word-from-keyboards, to be fascinated or intrigued.
Purple cow was sold largely through buzz marketing that spread by blogs
relatively quickly.
The Lincoln Fry Blog (http://lincolnfry.typepad.com/blog/)
was another example of buzz marketing taking hold in the blogging world.
Another tactic of gaining attention online is
through the development and release of a cool tool. A cool tool is something
that captures the imagination of the online browsing public and it is thought to
be so cool that it should be shared with online friends. This could be a video
clip, standalone software that is cute such as a cartoon character that lives on
a users screen, or some other device that is used often for a specific purpose,
such as 3Ms Post-it Notes.
Right in the middle of a new marketing practice
is eBay with its datafeed marketing. Essentially a store owner sets up his/her
data in eBay and then by way of feeds make this data available to advertising
avenues, such as Froogle, Yahoo Product Search and about another twenty of thirty other sites that
take datafeeds. All the advertising feed services point the prospective
purchaser to the eBay auction. This is perhaps a little like building a sales
funnel as described above, however, it uses a specific technology that enables
ease of use.
Marketing on the internet requires that one be
found using keyword searches or some form of online advertising. In any case the
trick to being successful in Online Marketing is being found within the top 30
search results. There are 3 ways that one can be found. 1.) natural search
engine ranking (70% of searchers will skip over sponsored results and start with
the naturaly ranked sites) 2.) Paid inclusion and 3.) Pay per click. Due to the
extreme difficulty of achieving a natural high ranking on a major search engine
most companies opt for #'s 2 and 3 for their online marketing. Unfortunately the
3rd option is very costly and only the most well heeled companies can afford to
market online via pay per click.
What is true of Online Marketing today is that
one must pay to play. Since the dot com bust several years ago search engines
have discerned that in order to survive and thrive they must generate
significant revenue. At first the hope was that banner advertising would be
sufficient to fill the search engine coffers but it soon became evident that
searchers did not respond to banners. It then became evident that there were 2
primary ways to create income for search engines and online directories. Thus
paid inclusion and pay per click were born!
Recently potential greed realted challenges have
emerged. There are companies that create false hits and traffic. Most recently
Google has been sued for click fraud;
http://www.webproworld.com/viewtopic.php?t=47999. Whether or not the charges
prove to be true, actions like this make people think twice about using pay per
click as part of their online marketing package.
Semantic logic will allow searchers to use not
just keywords to search, but rather they will search using common language. This
is a big departure from the crude Booleen logic which has served the Internet
searching communinty for the last decade.
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