Chances are that if you are not engaged in some form Internet marketing you are doing a great disserservice to your company. The marketing (promotional aspect) landscape has fundamentally shifted due to the Internet. The Internet along with mobile technologies have forever changed the landscape of advertising mainly because the way people communicate, entertain and inform themselves. Traditional media is being marginalized by the digital space. Consumers today have a lot more choices where and how to spend their time and as a result it is forcing companies today to ask what their Internet marketing strategy should be. To choose the correct strategy for your company you need to get closer to your customers. You need to learn their habits, segment them and communicate in very relevant ways. Philip Kotler, the creator of the the 4ps says it best in his forward for Kellogg on Branding “In the age of hypercompetition, commoditization, globalization, and rapid technological obselescence, marketers are struggling to find new conceptual base on which to design and their marketing programs. The haunting truth is that traditional marketing is not working. Top management now sees many mass advertising campaigns as losing money. They see sales promotion campaigns as boosting sales temporarily but being largely unprofitable. They experience direct mail campaigns as barely delivering a 1 percent response rate. Their new products are failing at a disturbing rate. There are two answers to the marketing challenge facing today’s companies. One is to know your customer better and to get closer to them. The other is to differentiate your offering through your branding work so that the offering stands out as relevant and superior in value to a clear target market.” Understanding your customers is vital to crafting an effective marketing strategy. Without a clear understanding of your customers you are lost at sea. It doesn’t matter if you are a B2B, B2C, online or offline business, knowing your customer is vital. In our opinion it is vital because it constitutes the strategic component of your marketing efforts. If you get the strategy wrong it doesn’t matter what tactics, Internet marketing or otherwise, your not going to be very successful. In today’s digitized world it doesn’t take a lot of effort to have a solid customer insight. There are thousands of tools readily available to help you capture information in order to learn more about your customer. These tools range from free to expensive. A free tool like Surveymonkey allows you to create a survey. All you have to do is invite your customer via email to participate. Another way of surveying your customers is to do it right on your website with a pop up screen. This free online web survey from iperception allows you to ask your customer 4 questions about their experience on your website. If you have a website, Google’s free Google Analytics tools is invaluable. The analytics tool along with other Google tools like Website Optimizer provides a vast amount of information on what your customer is looking for on your site. Although it lacks the demographic information, nevertheless it is an essential tool that should be used. Other tools available and no doubt you heard about them include, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, customized databases, loyalty programs, and of course outsourcing to market search firms. There is a method available to accommodate any budget. We could not stress enough the importance of knowing your customer. Any marketing effort void of this will surely fail.
Why Google is Worth $171 Billion
All marketing efforts including your competition’s is usually geared towards raising awareness to create demand. Creating demand is expensive through mass media like television, Radio and Newspapers and hard to measure. The reason Google is worth $171 Billion is that it provides a market of customers ready to buy. You don’t have to go out and spend millions of dollars trying to create demand. People are already looking for services or products by typing in search queries in their search engine. In December 2008 there were approximately 1.6 billion people online worldwide. These 1.6 billion people performed approximately 8.6 billion searches. Notice Google’s dominance at capturing 5.5 billion searches or 33.5% of the total search market. Granted that not all these people were looking to buy, but nevertheless that is a significant amount of people and search volume. This is were search engine marketing (SEM) comes in. There is already a market of people searching for your products or services like yours. However, we know that all these individuals are not necessarily looking for your product or looking to buy something. In fact it is well known that people conduct three types of searches:
- Navigational–looking for a specific website but don’t know the name so they search for it on a search engine
- Informational–people seeking knowledge on a specific subject
- Transactional–people are looking to do something, will purchase something or perform a transaction of some sort
By using a tool like Google Keyword, it is easy to see the volume of searches that are being performed for a particular word. For example in Canada, in July 2009, there were 673,000 searches performed for the word “netbook”. Globally there were 450,000 searches performed. If your company sells notebooks, what percentage of these searches did you capture?
The Most Effective Internet Marketing Tactics are:
- Paid Search
- SEO
- Email Marketing
Email Marketing
Email marketing is perhaps the most cost effective way to market to your customers. Two rules you must follow for email to be effective are the following: 1. It must be relevant to your customer–To make your email relevant you must know your customer, see above. The email must be highly personalized to the individuals needs. Here is an excellent case study of plus more detail in how to effectively conduct an email marketing campaign. The case is a classic scenario in what not to do. The author talks about buying a high-end suit at high-end store and gets a generic email after a long time after his email was taken. He breaks down exactly what the company did wrong and what they should have done. 2. You must have opt in from your customer–sending an unsolicited message will most likely end up as span.
Search Engine Marketing
Search Engine Marketing includes paid and non-paid (organic) search marketing. Typically paid marketing is usually referred to Pay per Click and non paid as Search Engine Optimization (SEO). A company needs to do do both to have a successful search engine marketing campaign. Up to this point we have been talking about generating leads by matching keywords, the marketing. But this alone does not translate into a sale. One of the key mistakes businesses make is confusing marketing with sales. Although the ultimate goal is to sell, marketing alone does not sell. Marketing creates the opportunity to make that sale. It doesn’t matter if its an online or offline sale, differentiating marketing from sales is important for a successful campaign. To actually close a sale there needs to be focus on the conversion component of the sales process. An awareness of your how your customer makes a purchasing decision. The psychology of your customer must be understood. This were analytics can be invaluable.
- The reason landing pages are so important is that it will either maker or break a sale. If a prospect clicked on a link and they are taken to an irrelevant page, you can be certain they will leave in a heartbeat.
- The presentation of your service or product must adhere to behavioral economics principals. Such concepts as relativity, Price and exploring the “free” online.