The Internet as an Essential Marketing Tool

The Internet as an Essential Marketing Tool

Rick Quinn

Rock University

06 May 2017

The internet in and of itself has changed the consumer/marketer dynamic. Without the internet you couldn’t find a product cheaper than it’s sold for in physical stores without driving to another store. It has allowed business owners to escape the risk and expensive costs of owning a physical shop, and place these site owners in direct competition with brick and mortar locations, with no overhead. A website is cheaper and allows businesses to reach more people.

In regards to marketing, physical stores had to reach their consumers with traditional media (ads, radio) and hope that they would purchase, but the internet changed the consumer/market dynamic as websites can place cookies on a consumer’s browser to track buying habits and use this data to target specific individuals and their needs/wants. The Ted talk presenter this semester discusses this in the ads that pop up after researching a product in future browsing.

This provides marketers the information on what consumers are looking for in products they want to purchase. Servers in a search engines, such as Google’s, gather and compile this consumer data about products they are searching for to provide a better, more efficient search process that marketers can use with their internet pages.

Consumers now have more options and can conduct more research before buying and can leave reviews to influence others buying decisions.

Marketers utilize a lot of tools at their disposal to understand who their customers are and who they should market their goods to. Businesses are using Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to better their place on the internet for potential customers. “Search engine optimization refers to any efforts at improving the search engine rankings of a website.” (FirstView, Online) Google uses SEO to look at over 200 factors in page ranking. It looks for relevancy and popularity, and then determines the sites page place in the list of pages. This is important for businesses because the higher the ranking the more clicks the business will receive. It really means that if you can continually show in all these search results that you are gaining more and more mindshare with each potential customer, hopefully they will eventually click through to your website. SEO brings business traffic, provides your business with credibility, it is cost effective by providing a higher ROI for advertising compared to other forms of online marketing, and can give an insight to customers.

These same businesses are taking the data received from their marketing campaigns and using data analytics to find what they are doing well and where they need to improve. Data analytics is important because, as the presenter states, “it can define the difference between winners and losers.” (McKinsey, 2015 Video) The ability to get incremental results out of marketing dollars, margin out of pricing and promotion decisions, incremental sales out of better supply chain and management decisions will define the gap between the gap between those winners and losers.

Figuring out what to do with this data is another piece of the puzzle. Different types of companies will utilize the data available in different ways, depending on their Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), or site goals.

• Retail sites may utilize the data to see visits, conversion rates, average order value, and revenue per visitor.
• Lead generating sites may use the data to see unique visitors, conversion rate, close rate, closed deal value, and revenue per visitor.
• Media sites make money through advertising so their data inquiries will be around visits, average page depth, average visit duration, and conversions.
• Social media sites also make money from advertising so they will use analytics data to search new account sign-ups, posts/tweets/pins, likes/re-tweets/re-pins, and average time on site.

“The beauty of internet marketing is that every action your visitors take is tracked and stored somewhere, which represents a shift for marketing strategy.” (Kelley, 2015) Rather than relying on your gut to decide how well the marketers’ ideas are working, they can now use data to dissect campaigns, get insight into their ROI, and make the necessary changes to improve the campaign.

So why is online marketing so effective? Firstly, internet marketing is convenient and enables you to be open for business around the clock without worrying about store opening hours or overtime payments for staff. Offering products on the Internet is also convenient for customers. They can browse a company’s online store at any time and place orders when it is convenient for them.

Secondly, marketing products on the Internet costs less than marketing them through a physical retail outlet which helps overcome the barriers of distance. Businesses do not have the recurring costs of property rental and maintenance when setting up local outlets, helping to widen the target market. They do not have to purchase stock for display in a store. They can order stock in line with demand, keeping inventory costs low. A business can also build an export business without opening a network of distributors in different countries.

Next, internet marketing enables you to personalize offers to customers by building a profile of their purchasing history and preferences. By tracking the web pages and product information that prospects visit, a business can make targeted offers that reflect their interests.

Lastly, online marketing gives business owners the freedom to advertise and promote their products or services and receive immediate response. Business owners can reap the benefits of this method of marketing as it is inexpensive and easy to start.

We start with pay-per-click advertising, which is notably the most effective means of generating immediate traffic, leads & sales to a website. Advantages of this form include only paying when a user clicks on your ad. The source of traffic can be easily tracked as well as identify which ads are achieving the best result in a campaign, and target an audience more specifically.

We learned throughout the semester from our textbook that online marketing campaigns can be implemented much faster than traditional forms of advertising, reaching a targeted audience much sooner. We also learned from our weekly simulations how landing pages impact the number of leads. People who click on any marketing message you send should be directed to a customized landing page for that message, not to a general home page. And once those landing pages have been built, you can further promote your ad campaigns by directing visitors to them by way of a call-to-actions (CTA). CTAs are the triggers, often images, buttons or links, which lead your visitor to your offer. By clicking through a CTA, your prospect is further committing to your message and their buying decision.