A solid internet marketing strategy can provide your company with an important advantage over competitors and can include e-mailing, advertising, promotions and public relations.
Keeping user profiles, recording visits and analysing promotional and advertising result and key to measuring the effectivness of your marketing campaign
Brand is typically defined as a name, logo or symbol that help one identify a companies’ product or service.
A company’s customers’ experience can be considered as part of its brand and include the quality of customers interatcions with a company and its product or service.
Businesses that already have a strong brand may may find it easier to transfer this to the web, while internet only businesses must strive to develop a brand that customers trust and value.
Uniformity of the brand as it is used across all channels of customer contact will increase brand recognition.
The internet provides an opportunity for further branding for a company and its products. However the internet makes it difficult to protect a company’s brand from misuse and complaint spamming.
Web sites should be designed with customers preferances in mind and NOT those of the company.
Email is a fast, cheap and far reaching marketing tool.
By discovering your target market, you increase visits, responses and possible purchases.
Marketing reasearch can be preformed over the internet, giving marketers a new, faster option for finding and analysing industry, customers and competitor information.
Internet marketing should be used wth traditional marketing to enhance your strategy.
Organisations that plan to hit a global market must have the ability to send emails translated into the appropriate language , demonstrating your value to international customers. You can use altavista babelfish as a basic translating tool, but there are web based email marketing services that WILL provide this service.
Outsourcing servuces should be used when email marketing gets to difficult to manage, because of volume and inadequate staff or technical support.
Determining a goal for your campaign includes defining the reach, or the span of people you would like to target, incliuding geographical locations and demographic profiles. Determining the level of personalisation of the campaign is also improtant.
Use your ‘opt’ in mailing list for existing customers on a monthly basis, there are customers who are confident in your service and product and should be kept informed of new products/services. Word of mouth is also a forgotten aspect to marketing. A satisfied customer with recommend a brand and also buy again.
Traditional and direct marketing includes sending information by mail and using telemarketing, this should be used with email to reach more people.
Direct mailing is often more expensive, more difficult to analyse and has a lower response rate.
To allow people to view your company infomration, add your contact details to a list of companies or organisations related to your field of business.
Placing a direct email link on your website is a great idea but you will need to have the resporce to handle the anticipated volume.
Spamming, mass emailing to customers who have NOT expressed interest in receiving these email can refect badly on your company.
Offering something extra when your customers buy using promotional scheme or points systems can increase brand loyalty.
Placing a discount in your advertising in magazines, newspaper or direct email can bring new and repeat customers.
If you are providing a service offer a free trial so your customers can feel confident with the service before buying.
Your company can place coupons on sites that specialise in online coupons to bring in traffic.
Publising you URL on all marketing and business cards, place links on other companies websites and register with search engines and directories as a means to increase site traffic.
Continually strenthen your branding. Your brand should be unique, recognisable and easy to remember. make sure your main email address and URL are not to lengthy, sales@blah.comThis e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it or support@blah.comThis e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it are short and easy to remember.
Test out using banner ads. The benefits of banner advertising include increased brand recognition and exposure.
Be weary of using pop up ads. Most interent users now have pop up blockers and are increasingly annoyed at these kind of ads.
Use minimal adveretising click throughs on your OWN site, for example from google. This can increase your revenue.
Search Engine Ranking is improtant to bringing customers to your site. This is acheived using meta tags.
Know your key words! Good key words are essential to search engines and auction sites