Internet marketing

Any campaign is limited by the amount of advertising you can do depending on the size of your budget. Therefore it is important that you target your market carefully so as to maximize advertising spend on effective banner campaigns. 

Rich Media Advertising: Looking for ways to make online advertising more compelling, and hopefully thereby more acceptable, marketers have increasingly been turning to streaming advertising.

In effect another kind of rich media advertising, streaming advertising comes in two basic forms.

First, it can either be part of a streaming audio or video program on the web. With many people now listening to web radio or watching web broadcasts, this makes perfect sense. After all, everyone is accustomed to getting commercials on their TV or car radio.

The other channel for streaming advertising is essentially an infomercial. Consumers can download a streaming clip for a product or service from a marketer's website.

Two new studies recently released suggest that the streaming advertising market is going to boom now and in the years to come. The giant ad selling company media turf uses this method for providing content to advertisers

Conferences: By their nature conferences are organized for special interests. Advertising in conference literature, print and electronic, is an excellent way to contact target markets. 

Collaborative Marketing: Team up with other business to:

• Cross-promote - e.g. setting up links from one corporate Web site to another or offering special promotions in partnership with complementary goods or services.
• Advertise - share advertising.
• Participate in joint sponsorship of events, initiatives, informational Web

            sites, mailing lists, bulletin board systems, directories, etc. 

• Link exchange with trade/professionals associations to support credibility of firm, provide further market information to customers, build their awareness and prepare them for the action of purchasing.

 

Sales Promotion: Employing methods to stimulate sales through immediate or delayed incentives to the customer. If the incentive is attractive, the price: value ratio is adjusted favorably enough to affect a sale. This strategy should integrate with the overall marketing mix to balance extra sales with long-term profit motives. Examples of sales promotion strategies are: 

• Sampling - offering product samples, electronically.
• Bonus offers - offering additional goods or services when making single purchases (e.g. buy-one-get-one-free).
• Limited time offers - attracting visitors to return to a Web site.
• Games with prizes: Useful to keep people coming back to Web sites.
• Cross-product sampling: When a customer makes a purchase they have an opportunity to try out another company’s product/service. Also, the customer may have the opportunity to try out more than one company’s product/service while testing another. Useful for complementary products/services.
• Feature pricing: providing special pricing to those that order electronically.
• Cross-promotions with other companies’ products/services - Buy a company’s product/service and get a coupon for another company’s product/service.

 

Publicity: The goal of publicity is to have others talk about the small business or its products. It can be inexpensive or even free and it may have the potential to generate far more in sales than even a well executed advertising plan.  

Promotional Publications: Facilitate customer education, with the intention of building corporate image and even brand awareness, the small business may sponsor and/or publish its own electronic magazine on the Web, e-mail, etc. These are useful in fields where the customer needs information to develop sufficient knowledge for movement through the first three stages of the sales process of awareness, interest, and desire. Although time consuming, they replace or complement the print versions of newsletters/corporate magazines/flyers. 

Subscriptions: Business marketers may use their Web sites to encourage visitors to subscribe to receive regular email messages from the company. These messages are called digests or newsletters, and are a clever way for marketers to push product news to willing customers. 

Controlled-access Web pages: Clever business marketers may use their Web site to attract new customers. They might publish a Web page that allows customers to download a free trial version of a software application that expires after a time if not paid for. Or, customers might receive an e-mail message inviting them to visit a private Web page on the company’s intranet, and giving them a password. The company, as a way of encouraging a sale, offers customers who visit the page a prize or enticement of some sort. 

Public Forums: These are often community-based or interest-based sites that allow visitors to communicate with one another. An opportunity for small businesses to reach to their intended target group via these forums is by posting messages or by sponsoring such a forum. E-mail based forums appeal to a wider audience due to the greater use of this application over Web-based forums. Web based forums are advantageous for their superior display of advertising images/messages 

Resellers: Some sites will remarket other companies’ products as intermediaries. The companies that host these sites may have invested significant resources in making them attractive to the target audience a small business is interested in attracted. By piggybacking on another company’s efforts, cost-efficiencies may be realized by engaging in a reselling arrangement. 

E-mail Links: Visitors to a site should have the opportunity to correspond with the host of that site, especially if out of the telephone area or time zone. E-mail links may be strategically placed throughout the site to elicit response from visitors for at various points. These are also useful for feedback on site maintenance problems. 

On-line Surveys: Information may be collected on the visitors to a Web site through registration forms, on-line surveys, or through tracking of areas of site they visit. These websites also offer referrals wherein if you refer someone to their site and the person becomes a member then you are paid commission on that. 

Virtual Malls: Web based sites that allow companies to post their products or services for sale long with other companies. These may be product specific, may be arranged by complementary products, or may have products that are not related except by their companies’ desire to attract a similar target audience. 

Measurement: The Internet has the unique ability to provide marketers with detailed information about the success of their Web marketing programs. Companies can track visitors to their site and collect information about them from their “cookies,” then process this information using Web site analysis software.

Cookies are a type of digital identification, which is read every time the user connects to a public Web site. The Web site can collect some very basic information about the user (e-mail address, time of day the site was accessed, which pages were visited) and use it to create visitor profiles. Visitors can then be identified as “old” or “new” when they visit the site.

Cookies are an essential part of many companies’ business strategies. The information collected from them is used to measure site visitors, develop user profiles, and target advertising — in much the same way that television allows advertisers to target their message to a certain demographic.

 

Conclusion

Internet Marketing is a hot topic especially in these days of instant results. The reason why i-marketing has become so popular is because they provide three major benefits to potential buyers:

1. Convenience: Customers can order products 24 hours a day wherever they are. They don’t have to sit in traffic, and a parking space, and walk through countless shops to find and examine goods.

2. Information: Customers can find reams of comparative information about

companies, products, competitors, and prices without leaving their office or

home.

3. Fewer hassles: Customers don’t have to face salespeople or open themselves up to persuasion and emotional factors; they also don’t have to wait in line. 

Internet Marketing also provides a number of benefits to marketers:

1. Quick adjustments to market conditions: Companies can quickly add products to their offering and change prices and descriptions.

2. Lower costs: On-line marketers avoid the expense of maintaining a store and the costs of rent, insurance, and utilities. They can produce digital catalogs for much less than the cost of printing and mailing paper catalogs.

3. Relationship building: On-line marketers can dialogue with consumers and learn from them.

4. Audience sizing: Marketers can learn how many people visited their on-line site and how many stopped at particular places on the site. This information can help improve offers and ads. 

Clearly, marketers are adding on-line channels to find, reach, communicate, and sell. I-marketing has at least five great advantages. First, both small and large firms can afford it. Second, there is no real limit on advertising space, in contrast to print and broadcast media. Third, information access and retrieval are fast, compared to overnight mail and even fax. Fourth, the site can be visited by anyone from any place in the world. Fifth, shopping can be done privately and swiftly. 

The Internet is a powerful tool for strengthening relationships. By offering customers content and time value, E-Marketing has opened new vistas for marketers. The greatest feature of the digital economy is that it enables the E-Marketer to eradicate man traditional barriers before entering new markets. These barriers include economies of scale and geographic positioning. The innate strength of an E-Market comes not from the seamless flows of goods and services from the producer to the customer but in the geometrically increasing returns from converging ideas and technological change the strength of online communities has never been so great, and companies have used them to develop new markets. Notice how Linux distributed free on the Net has been able to build up a faithful customer base. Ultimately here also the marketer has to realize that nothing sells as well as a good product. But the beauty of the Internet is that it offers constant opportunities for product enhancement based on continuous customer feedback. Companies who have tuned their business processes to incorporate these customer responses have been able to leverage the power of the Web to gain competitive advantage.

 

GLOSSARY

1. Advertising Network – a group of Web sites where one advertiser controls all or a portion of the ads for all sites.

 

2. AdWords – AdWords is Google’s paid search marketing program, the largest such program in the world and in most countries with notable exceptions.

 

3. Affiliate Marketing – a type of internet marketing in which you partner with other Web sites, individuals, or companies send traffic to your site.

 
 

4. Analytics– also known as Web Metrics. Analytics refers to collection of data about a Web site and its users. Analytics programs typically give performance data on clicks, time, pages viewed, Web site paths, and a variety of other information.

 

5. Banners – picture advertisements placed on Web sites. Such advertising is often a staple of internet marketing branding campaigns. Depending upon their size and shape, banner ads may also be referred to as buttons, in lines, leader boards, skyscrapers, or other terms.

 

6. Click through Rate (CTR) - is a common internet marketing measurement tool for ad effectiveness. This rate tells you how many times people are actually clicking on your ad out of the number of times your ad is shown. Low click through rates can be caused by a number of factors, including copy, placement, and relevance.

 

7. Cost per Acquisition (CPA) – an online advertising cost structure where you pay per an agreed upon actionable event, such as a lead, registration, or sale.

 

8. Cost per Click (CPC) – a common way to pay for search engine and other types of online advertising, CPC means you pay a pre-determined amount each time someone clicks on your advertisement to visit your site. You usually set a top amount you are willing to pay per click for each search term, and the amount you pay will be equal or less to that amount, depending on the particular search engine and your competitors’ bids.

 

9. Cost per Impression (CPM) – a common internet marketing cost structure, especially for banner advertising. You agree to pay a set cost for every 1,000 Impressions your ad receives. Search engine marketing may involve CPM costs for Contextual Advertising. This internet advertising pay structure should really be called Cost per 1,000 Impressions.

 

10. ECommerce – the ability to purchase online. ECommerce also goes by other super-snazzy names like etail. Web site features that allow ecommerce are commonly called shopping carts.

 

11. Email Campaign System – email is perhaps the most overlooked and underutilized (based on cost and effectiveness) form of internet marketing today. Email campaign systems allow organizations to send out emails to their email lists with a standard look and feel. Features often include the ability to segment lists.

 

12. Geo-Targeting – the ability to reach potential clients by their physical location. The major search engines now all offer the ability to geo-target searches in their Pay-Per-Click campaigns by viewing their ip addresses. Geo-targeting allows advertisers to specify which markets they do and don’t want to reach.

 

13. HTML– HyperText Markup Language, the programming language used in Web sites. Developers use other languages that can be read and understood by HTML to expand what they can do on the Web.

 

14. Internet Marketing – any of a number of ways to reach internet users, including Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, and Banner advertising. Direct Online Marketing™ specializes in these internet marketing services.

 

15. Keyword – almost interchangeable with Search Term, keywords are words or a group of words that a person may search for in a Search Engine. Keywords also refer to the terms you bid on through search engine marketing in trying to attract visitors to your Web site or Landing Page.

 

16. Pay per Click (PPC) – see Cost per Click (CPC), above. The most common type of search engine advertising cost structure is PPC search engine marketing. Google, Yahoo, MSN, and many more search engines all use PPC.

 

17. Scraping – the process of copying content from one Web property and using it on another. In other words, stealing. Scraping technologies have evolved because of the needs for content and to stay ahead of legitimate content creators trying to protect what they’ve written. Some companies offer content monitoring to help protect against scraping.

 

18. Search Engines – search engines are places people go to search for things on the internet, such as Yahoo!, Google, or Yandex. Most search engines provide Web sites two ways of appearing: Natural (free) and Paid.

 

19. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – a fancy way of saying “making your site search engine friendly”. Search engine optimization is typically difficult to do on your own, especially given the increasing complexity and differences among all the search engines.

 

20. Social Networking – a type of Social Media, Social networking Web sites allow users to interact and create or change content on the site. These sites, of which businesses are now using for marketing purposes, allow users to create their own Web sites / online spheres (e.g. vkontakte and facebook), share photographs (e.g. flickr), microblog / text small bits of information to their personal community (e.g. twitter) or recommend information for others to find on the Internet.

 

21. Yandex – Yandex is the fastest growing search engine in the world, serving primarily Russia and other countries formerly part of the Soviet Union. It has been experimenting with an English-based search engine, but its main operations are for its Cyrillic engine. They do also offer a Google AdWords-like paid search program: Yandex Direct.

 

APPENDICES

App.1. World internet usage and population statistics 

 

 

App.2. Internet users in the world distribution by world regions 

 

App.3. Internet users in Russia

 
 
 

App.4. Top 10 Internet countries in Europe 

 

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

 

Books

Marketing Management – Philip Kotler

E-commerce –  Andrey Ashmanov