Online Marketing

These last years, the importance of marketing has grown more and more important in the online sector thus giving it the name of “online marketing”. Online marketing has many abbrevations, also known as e-marketing for the e-commerce sector.

It once appeared so unrealisitc to open an online shop, sell goods and services online, and market for various industries on web portals with high outreaches. Then it all exploded and bursted into a growth sector, just like the days of the wild west. Portals promised Millions of revenues to their shareholders and clients who booked marketing services with them. Ther business model usually was justa simple case study and business plans for the lonely banner placement Ads. Which at first, seemed more to bug people than to be accepted as a form of advertising from the web surfers. Now, seeing a web banner or web adverts is just like seeing adverts on TV…

So, a few years back at around the year 2000 many websites popped out of nowhere and got into Banner advertising. As quick as they came, with a span of time of just a few clicks they dissapeared again. So, the idea of what banner advertising was, its effects and returns had to be reviewed if it was really profitable. Many learnt their lesson and realised that banner advertising is more useful for Brand awareness than getting immediate return over investment (ROI). The web cleansed itself from weak business models and many other online marketing models were found that turned out to be profitable. These have been regrouped into two main fields; online advertising and search engine marketing as well as search engine optimization (SEO).

Online marketing is composed of these different strategic e-marketing tools:

- Pay per click
- Search engine optimization
- Press releases
- Web banners
- Link campaign
- E-mail and Newsletters
- Viral marketing and Word of mouth
- Affiliate marketing
- blogs
- news headlines carried by Really Simple Syndication
- discussion boards
- and more...

Purpose of Online Marketing

The purpose of marketing a service or product online is to create awareness, interactivity and generate revenues through various of strategies. Companies are also able to give a more personal touch to their activities as potential clients can inform themselves about their operations, services and products directly online, at a time which is convenient for the client as well comfortable from home.

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:

Identifying - the Internet be used for marketing research to find out customers' needs and wants;

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.

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?

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:

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)

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)

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.

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)

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.

Ways of gaining attention through the web include various tactics.

Buzz marketing - it requires the attentions of people, the information/product/service that is being promoted gets widespread through word of mouth, word from keyboards. It tends to be a quicker process and involves less investments on behalf the marketers. An exmaple is Purple cos that got mainly marketed through buzz marketing by receiving great attention through Blogs.

Cool tools - some companies had the great idea of developping a challenging useful tool which a user might need or it can come handy while trying to organise or sort some information. Tools which appear to make our life more easier get recognition and are easily recommended by others. For example the free adressbook of plaxo, birthday reminder sites, pill reminder sites etc. While the user accesses these sites, these companies will sell the product that comes in handy to the handy solution. For example birthday reminder sites will let you know for free when your buddy has his birthday but when you will want to send a birthday ecard from that site you will be charged.

A great new development are games developed in flash which can easily be downloaded online. Many companies inform their users about new items through a game, where in the game you see the advertising of the products. The response in this field has been very good.

Product Datafeeds - You can publish your products that you sell in your online shop on various big portals such as ebay or froogle where you can simply upload your product datafeeds.

Keyword Marketing - In order to get found in the search engines, you can also bid on keywords which relate to your industry. With a good stretegy, the choosing of the right keywords, a good ROI can be reached. 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.

The Future

Definitely lies in the hands of the search engines, since most potential buyers start their journey with a search engine typing in a keyword, in the quest of the optimum product and price. Marketing in search engines should definitely be part in of your marketing budget or you might be missing out some great potential customers who are willing to buy!

Windfall Gains and Online Marketing

At windfall gains we want to share information about online marketing. Inform users about various marketing practices and share opinions, ideas, strategies, and possible ways how you can improve on your marketing plans to gain new customers. The strategy of windfall gains remains into building a useful ressource for entrepreneurs who are active online in various fields, be it online shops, seos, copywriters, webmasters etc. In our articles section we have posted numerous articles from professional marketers who are sharing their experiences and successes. At windfall gains we want you to join in the discussion in our marketing forums where you can share your experience, opinion, stretegies, help others find new information on how to improve your plans and to have fun in this growing community. We wish you a nice time and stay at windfall gains!