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Introduction Technology Infrastructure Selling on the Web Marketing
quick_links electonic commerce
Intro to E-Commerce
Waves
Models and Processes
Economic Forces
Opportunities
International
Technology Infrastructure
Internet and WWW
Packet Switiching
Protocols
Markup Languages
Intra and Extra-nets
Connection Options
Selling on the Web
Revenue Models
Models in Transistion
Strategy Issues
Web Presence
Usability
Connecting with Customers
Marketing on the Web
Web Marketing Strategies
Communicating
Beyond Segmentation
Advertising
E-Mail Marketing
Customer Relaionship Management
Brands
Search Engines and Domain Names

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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After you have created your site, it is vital to your success that you develop a marketing strategy to advertise your products or services and promote your reputation. The marketing strategy works together with the Web presence to get the company's message across to current and prospective customers. The essential issues of marketing can be divided into the four Ps: product, price, promotion, and place. Product includes your brand, or the customer's perception of your product. Price is key because you don't want to miss your proce point and lose customers. Promotion is the means by which you advertise, and place which covers the distribution of your product. You must consider all these things to decide which marketing strategy works best for you.

A product-based marketing strategy organizes the site from an internal viewpoint. It focuses on the products. This approach works well for sites that want a person to visit and search for a specific product. They want the experience for the customer to be an enabling one that can help customers meet their individual needs. A customer-based marketing strategy focuses on the customer and their specific needs. This approach is popular with B2B sites, as sellers became aware of the need to customize product and service offerings to match the needs of their customers. It is beginning to become popular with B2C businesses as well.

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The first step in communicating with different market segments is identifying groups of potential customers. The next step is determining what communication media you need to use to carry the marketing message. As mentioned before, one of the most important elements involved in creating a relationship with customers via the Web is trust. Using the Internet as a communication tool offers many of the advantages of personal contact savings and the cost benefits of mass media. Many people have developed a resistance to general mass media messages. so it is important to be innovative when deciding what types of ads to place. Using a blog and maintaining contact with your customer base are two ways to achieve that trust factor.

Another way to be effective with your marketing is to divide your pool of potential customers into segments based on certain characterisics and target these groups with specific ads that are targeted to their needs. There are several ways to determine what these segments are including geography (where they live or work), demographics (age, race, gender, income, religion, etc), and psychographics (social class, personality, or lifestyle). This approach is effective on the Web because your audience is so vast. It would be impossible to reach every person and convince them to buy your product. It is much more effective to direct your efforts to those who are more likely to spend money on your stuff.

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You can take segmentation one step farther by targeting specific customers in different ways at different times. The creation os seperate experiences for customers based on their behavior is called behavioral segmentation. When based on an occassion, it may be called occasion segmentation. Researchers are learning more and more about customer behavior on the Web and marketing professionals are using this information to create Websites that can meet the needs of those behaviors.

There are three types of behavior patterns: browsers, buyers, and shoppers. A browser is someone who is "just looking". This is the user whom you want to prompt to stay and buy something. It is most important to create a favorable impression for first time visitors. A buyer arrives ready to purchase. For this custome, be sure that nothing gets in the way of that purchase. Shopping carts are great ways to accomodate the buyer. A shopper is one who is motivated to buy, but looking for more information. For this visitor, your site should offer product reviews, information, etc. to give the user as much information as he needs to make his purchase.

Acquiring new visitors to your site is a process. The cost of attracting one visitor is called the acquisition cost. The next step is conversion, which occurs when a visitor becomes a member or customer. The last step is to retain the customer, or make sure they come back to the site. It is very important to retain your customers, because ti is much more expensive to acquire new ones.

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domain

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A key way to communicate with your customers is through advertising. There are several ways to advertise on the Web, the most popular being with banner ads. These can be placed in proper places and entice users to click on them to visit their site. These could be animated ads, or even pop-ups (although I don't recommend them). Determing what type of ad to use and where to put it is a big decision and should be based on the information you have gathered from your market analysis.

The effectiveness of online advertising is hard to measure. THere is no industry standard measuring service to determine what is working and what is not. It is a smart practice to use online advertising in conjunction with other forms to be sure that you are reaching your potential audience.

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E-mail has been proclaimed to be one of the greatest tools for human communication developed in the 20th century. Because of this, it makes sense that e-mail is a great advertising tool. The problem is that mass e-mails can be thought of as spam, so be sure that your e-mails are invited. A mailing list can be subscribed or unsubscribed to with one click. Making your mailing list difficult to be removed from is a big turn off. Once you have your mailing list, send emails that are brief and to the point. Adding hyperlinks is a great way to encourage easy access to your products.

An interesting way to encourage users to read your emails os to include interesting content with your advertisement. Whether it be a news article or just a customer review, it gains the users attention. Another good idea is to offer a coupon or special. I know I have signed up for sites just to get the deals the may offer.

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Technology enables us to gather much more information about who is visiting your site, like which pages were viewed, how long it was viewed, the sequence, etc. A firm can use this information to set prices, negotiate terms, choose promotions, add product features and basically customize the site based on the needs of it's customers.

Firms need to view this information as a source of value. There are many tools at your disposal to help track this information, so be sure to use it to imporve your marketspace.

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Brand names can present a powerful statement of quality, value and other qualities to potential customers. Products with a recognizable brand are easier to advertise and promote. The brand becomes an icon for the reputation of the company. The key elements for a good brand are diffrentiation (clearly distinguish your product from others), relevance (make the customer visualize why they need your product), and percieved value. A brand becomes established after it has acheived these three goals.

There are several ways to build your brand on the Web. One is to using rational branding, or making the customer realize they need your product or service. Brand leveraging is another way to promote your brand. This involves extending your dominant position to other products and services. Brand consolidation is also a way of promoting. This involves taking differnt components of an idea or event and putting everything you would need for them in one place. Creating a new brand on the Web can be tricky, but is very important. The brand becomes a part of the Web presence and when a customer sees your brand, they automatically relate it to your company.

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Once you have created your Web presence and your brand, you must make sure people can find your site. You can acheive this through search engines. Search engines contain three parts, the first is called a spider and is a a program that automatically searches the Web to find pages that might be interesting, collects the URL and keywords and returns that information to the database. The third element is the search utility. A user provides a search term and the utility creates a query to the databse and provides the user with links to sites that contain iformation about the term they entered. It is important to make sure that your firm has good placement on these search engines so that people can find them easily. Sometimes to achieve this you need to buy a paid placement or sponsorship to get the best spots. You can also buy banner ads to be placed at the top of the search engine list.

The domain name that you choose for your company should reflect your brand name and reputation. You want it to be something that makes sense and is easily remembered. You also may want to purchase several domain names, either to cover your bases with different spellings or versions of your name, or to seperate your site into different departments if the site is very large. Domain names are inexpensive, but must be purchased on a yearly basis. Be sure not to let yours expire.

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