Online Presence: Online Presence

On line marketing is the fastest growing form of direct marketing. Recent technological advances have created a digital age. Rife use of the internet is having a dramatic impact on both buyers and the marketers who serve them. Now we find who marketing strategy and practice are changing to take advantage of today’s internet technologies. After a frenzied and rocky start in the 1990s, many click dot com (or others) is now prospering in today’s online market space. As the internet grew, the success of the dot-com caused existing brick and mortar manufacturers and retailers to reexamine how they served their markets. Now almost all of these traditional companies have set up their own on lines sales and communications channels becoming clicked and mortar companies. It’s hard to find a company today that doesn’t have a substantial web presence.

Types of On Line Marketing

The four major online marketing domains include B2C (business to consumer), B2B (business to business), C2C (consumer to consumer) and C2B (consumer to business).

B2C (Business to Consumer)

The popular press has paid the most attention to B2C, business selling goods and services online to final consumers. Today’s consumer can buy almost anything online, for example clothing, kitchen gadgets, airline/railway tickets and computers or cars. Online consumer buying continues to grow at a healthy rate. Make than half of U.S. household now regularly shop online. By 2010, the internet will influence a staggering 50 percent of total sales. Thus smart marketers are employing integrated multichannel strategies that use the web to drive sales to other market channels.

As more and more people find their way on the web, the populations of the online consumers is becoming more mainstream and diverse. The web now offers to marketers which have different kinds of consumers, seeking different kinds of online experiences.

However, internet consumers still differ from traditional offline consumers in their approaches to buying and in their responses to marketing. In the internet exchange process, customers initiate and control the contact. Traditional marketing targets a somewhat passive audience. In contrast, online market targets people who actively select which web sites they will visit and what marketing information they will receive about which products and under what conditions. Thus the new world of online marketing requires new marketing approaches. The website also offers several tour packages for tourists and run special trains which taking them through heritage sights and familiarizing them to glorious past.

B2B (Business to Business)

Although the popular press has given the most attention to B2B web sites, this type of marketing is also prosperous. B2B marketers use business to business web sites, e-mail, online product catalogs, online trading network and other online resources to reach new business customers. These serve current customers more effectively and obtain buying competences or product prices. Most major B2B marketers now offer product information, customers purchasing and customer support services online. Some companies conduct almost all of their business on the web. Networking equipment and software maker systems take more than 82 percent of its order over the internet.

Beyond simply selling their products and services online, companies can use the internet to build stronger relationships with important business customers. For example, Dell has set up customized web sites for more than 110,000 business and institutional customers worldwide. These individualized Dell sites help to get business or customers to more efficiently, manage all phase of their Dell products and services. Each customer’s Dell web site can contain a customized online computer store, purchasing and asset management reports and tools, system specific technical information and more. The site makes all the information for a customer needs in order to do business with Dell which available in one place, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

C2C (Consumer to Consumer)

Much C2C online marketing and communication occurs on the web between interested parties over a wide range products and subjects. In some cases, the internet provides an excellent means by which consumers can buy or exchange goods or information directly with one another. For example, eBay and amazon or other auction sites offer popular market spaces for displaying and selling almost anything from art and antiques, coins and stamps etc.

In other cases, C2C involves interchanges of information through internet forums that appeal to specific special interest groups. Such activities may be organized for commercial or non-commercial purposes. An example is web logs, blogs, online journals where people post their thoughts, usually on a narrowly defined topic. Blogs can be about anything, for example politics, business, games and cars etc. Many marketers are now tapping into blogs as a medium for reaching carefully targeted consumers. As marketing tools, blog offer some advantages. They can offer a fresh, original, personal and cheap way to reach today’s fragmented audiences.

C2B (Consumer to Business)

The final online marketing domain is C2B. Thanks to the internet, today’s consumers are finding it easier to communicate with companies. Most companies now invite prospectus and customers to send in suggestions and questions via company web sites. Beyond this rather than waiting for an invitation, consumers can search out sellers on the web, learn about their offers, initiate purchases and given feedback. Using the web, consumers can even drive transactions with business rather than the other way around. For example, using priceline.com would be buyers can bid for airlines tickets, hotel rooms, rental cars and vacation packages, leaving the sellers to decide whether to accept their offers.

Setting up Online Presence

All companies need to consider moving online. Companies can conduct online marketing in any of the following main four ways.

Creating a Web Site

The first step in conducting online marketing is to create a web site. However beyond simply creating a web site, marketers must design an attractive site and find ways to get consumers to visit the site stay around and come back often.

These sites corporate ore brand are designed to build customer goodwill, collect customer feedback and supplement other sales channels rather than to sell the company’s product directly. They typically offer a rich variety of information and other features in an effort to answer customer question, build closer customer relationship and generate excitement about the company or brand.

Believe it or not these corporate web sites are pulling in more eyeballs and more influences than flashy prime time TV shows, print magazines and general interest sites. In corporate and brand web site, visitors are much more likely to influence others and to recommend brands to them. Creating a web site means, getting people to visit the site. To attract visitors, companies aggressively promote their websites in offline print; broadcast advertising through ads and links on other sites. But today’s web users are quick to abandon and web site that doesn’t measure up. The key is to create enough value and excitement to get consumers who come to the site to stick around and come back again. This means that companies must constantly update their sites to keep them current, fresh and useful.

For some types of products, attracting visitors is easy. Consumers buying new product new cars, computers and financial services will be open to information or marketing initiatives from sellers. Marketers of lower involvement products however may face a difficult challenge in attracting web sites visitors. A key challenge is designing a web site that is attractive on first view and interesting enough to encourage repeat visitors. Many marketers create colorful, graphically sophisticated web sites that combine text, sound and animation. To attract new visitors and to encourage revisits, suggests one expert online marketer should pay close attention to the seven Cs of effective web site design.

Context: the site’s layout and design
Content: the text, pictures, sound and video
Community: the ways that the site enables user to user communication
Customization: the site’s ability to tailor itself to different users or to allow users to personalize the site
Communication: the ways the site enables site to user, user to site or two way communications
Connection: the degree that the site is linked to other sites
Commerce: the site capabilities to enable commercial transactions

Get Online Promotion

As consumers spend more and more time on the internet, many companies are shifting more of their marketing dollars to online advertising to build their brands or to attract visitors to their web sites. Online advertising is becoming a major medium. The major forms of online medium include display ads, search related ads and online classifieds. Online display ads might appear anywhere on an internet user’s screen.

The most common form is banner, banner-shaped ads found at the top, bottom, left, right or center of a web page. With the increase in broadband internet access in every home, many companies are developing exciting new rich media display ads which incorporate animation, video, sound and interactivity. Rich media ads attract and hold consumer’s attention better than traditional ads. They employ techniques such as float, fly and snap back – animation that jump out and sail over the web page before retreating to their original space.

By many rich media ads do more than create a little bit of jumping animation, they also create interactivity. Many of today’s rich media ads provide consumers with product information, a brand experience and even local or online buying options without taking them away from the site they are viewing.

Another hot growth area for online advertising is search related ads in which text based ads and link appear alongside search engine results on sites such as a Google and Yahoo. Other forms of online promotion include content sponsorships, alliances and affiliate programs and viral advertising. Using content sponsorships, companies gain name exposure on the internet by sponsoring special content on various web sites such as news, financial information or special internet topics. Finally online marketers use viral marketing, the internet version of word of mouth marketing. Viral marketing involves creating a web site, video, e mail message or other marketing event that is so infections that customers will want to pass it along to their friend. One observer describes viral marketing as addictive, self-propagating advertisement that lives on web sites, blogs, cell phones, message board and even in real world stunts. Because customers pass the message or promotion along to others, viral marketing can be very inexpensive. And when the information comes from a friend, the recipient is much more likely to open and read it.

Plan (Future Memory) Networks

Marketers who think bigger is better may want to reconsider, at least when it comes to online social networks. Although giant networks such as MySpace and Facebook get all the attention these days, social networks focused on topics as remote as knitting or bird watching can present marketers with strong targeting opportunities. The popularity of the internet has resulted in a rash of online social networks or web communities. Countless independent and commercial web sites have arisen that given consumers online places to congregate, socialize and exchange views and information. But participating successfully in existing online social networks presents challenges.

Marketers can engage in online communication in two ways, they can participate in existing web communities or they can set up their own. Joining existing networks seems easiest. Thus, many major brands like Burger or Honda have set up many pages and profiles on many online social networks. Although the large online social networks such as MySpace and Facebook have grabbed most of the headlines, a new breed of more focused niche networks has recently emerged. These more focused networks cater to the needs of smaller communities of like-minded people.

Developing e Mail Strategies

E mail is an important and growing online marketing tool. A recent study of ad, brand and marketing manager found that nearly half of all the companies surveyed use e-mail marketing to reach customers. To compete effectively in this ever more cluttered e-mail environment, marketing are designing enriched e mail messages include animated, interactive and personalized messages full of streaming audio and video. Then they are targeting these attention grabbers more carefully to those who want them and will act upon them.

But there’s dark side to the growing use of email marketing. The explosion of spam unsolicited, unwanted commercial e-mail messages that clog up our e mailboxes, has produced consumer irritation and frustration. According to a one research company, spam now account for between 80 to 94 percent of all email sent. E mail marketers walk a fine line between adding value for consumers and being intrusive. To address the concern, most legitimate marketers now practice permission based email marketing, sending email pitches only to customers who opt in.

Online marketing continues to offer both greater promise and many challenges for the future. Its most ardent apostles still envision a time when the internet and online marketing will replace magazines, newspapers and even stores as sources for information and buying. Most marketers however hold a more realistic view. To be sure, online marketing will become a successful business model for some companies. Despite the many challenges, companies large and small are quickly integrating online marketing into their marketing strategies and mixes. As it continues to grow, online marketing will prove to be powerful direct marketing tools for improving sales, communicating company and product information, delivering products and services and building deeper customer relationships.