MARKETING ON THE WEB

About: Carpe Diem | |

by Elitsa Mihaylova*

International businesses have witnessed a major change in the way traditional marketing is taught and carried out in the last few years. Not only has the Internet changed the way business is done, but it has also greatly affected the marketing strategy of each and every company. Those who dared underestimate the importance and capacity of this new generation of marketing have probably already lost a lot of sales and interest in their businesses. Web marketing embraces website marketing, but also includes banner advertising, email marketing and other specific tricks to maximise the Internet to market a company's products or services. Web marketing is a follower of traditional marketing in many ways. It focuses on preliminary research, identification of target groups, development of a marketing strategy, and so on. The idea, however, remains the same – create a strong relationship between the business and the customer via the IT method of marketing.

Of particular interest to Internet marketers are the ways consumers behave and shop online. There's far more interaction and participation before, during and after every Internet purchase, while consumers are communicating with other users and company representatives more and more each day. But just like any marketing campaign, targeting and suitability is of great importance. For example, older audiences would like to read long pages of content and not deal with rich media and complicated new stuff.

On the contrary, younger audiences require recent technological innovations like rich media, as they demand more information, more control and more influence in the ways products and services are marketed and sold on the Internet. Knowing how fickle customers are, marketers must use innovations on websites with clarity to meet the expectations of the customer.

Social interaction also has a dramatic effect on any Internet marketing campaign. Whether it's on popular social media such as MySpace, YouTube, Linked-In or Facebook, your product or service is being discussed, analysed, praised and criticised. These sites, along with blogs and forums, provide an opportunity for the marketer to interact with an enthusiastic audience, discover their needs and desires, and build brand awareness. Today's smart marketer should monitor carefully and continuously what is being said on the Internet about their products and services and make ongoing adjustments to their campaigns. Indeed, social networks are gaining more and more popularity with every passing day. Some of them are highly respected communities.

One of the most effective and widely used methods of marketing on the web is banner advertising. This is not a new and exciting opportunity, but it has always worked well. Data has indicated that for every website produced, approximately five banners are released. It is also interesting that most companies are willing to pay large amounts for banner production and to publish them on partners' websites. This is quite odd as they would never spend that amount on SEO or usability. Banner ads may flash, move and attract audiences in a strange way, but attract they still do, and are therefore part of a good marketing strategy.

Talking about web marketing, it is time to present one of the most important means of communication today and its use in online marketing. Every self respecting business manager uses email today. One of its main advantages is that sending a message to someone is fast, reliable and, most importantly, cheap. Getting a potential client's email address is one of the top tasks of every website's team today. In this way companies are able to create databases with a targeted email list and later use it for their marketing purposes. Before you can keep in touch, you need to build a database. Before you build a database, you have to give people a reason to give you their contact information, whether it is with an e-magazine, weekly tips and articles of interest, or a web seminar. Once you have someone in your database you must continually create value and trust. This doesn't happen with one article, one tip or one short message. It will happen when it becomes your way of doing business. Email marketing is not spam. Email marketing is when someone has provided their email address with the intention of receiving further emails from a particular company, and sustaining communication.

A relatively new marketing approach should also be mentioned and explored. This is the so-called RSS feeds, which can be used to market a website. RSS is important when a website user decides that, instead of visiting a particular website every day and reading news and articles about certain items of interest, they could receive this information in due course through another portal that provides RSS. RSS provides a powerful information management tool that bypasses the increasingly crowded and annoying email channel. Having your favourite websites, media outlets and blogs feeding RSS is your own customised way of accessing exactly what you want to see.

The Web can be a powerful resource for a company's business. Taking advantage of the existing tactics mentioned above in combination with your IT and marketing departments will give you the competitive edge required to effectively position your company on the Web.

*Elitsa Mihaylova (ely@carpediem.bg) is a Business Consultant at Carpe Diem

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