Marketing & Selling Your Offer Online
Marketing online is all about showing your creative side in things such as designing, technical & development aspects like advertising & marketing to create promotional campaigns that lure customers to you. Affiliate marketing, search engine marketing, email marketing & interactive advertising are the different faces in the world of Internet marketing (IM).
Also on the list are sales, information management, public relations along customer service. From the time when the internet made its appearance on a global scale, it has been widely used for commercial purposes and businesses. A recent study has shown that 25% of people now shop for products in the virtual world.
Without a doubt, online marketing is here to stay and it is going to be very profitable for the people who know the nuances
Traditional and direct marketing methods such as television or radio commercials, newsletters & emails form the basis for Web marketing and they are crucial for understanding the direct response methods of such techniques.
B2B or Business-to-business, and B2C or business-to-consumer are the models on which Internet marketing can be linked. B2C business formed the initial era of marketing online campaigns when this all started, and B2B followed suit with interactions with themselves.
The websites that have been specifically built for marketing over the Internet have been different in design from other websites, and have focused on doing business and making profits with each other.
In other forms, customers name their prices, and the products that come within their price bracket are made available to them. Priceline.com is an example of one of such websites. Amazon.com is another website that follows the same paradigm, and it also supports auctioning so that people get the best deals for the products that they want to buy at attractive prices.
The direct benefactors from this internet marketing campaign are the companies that sell. Because the overhead on the financial front is very low, and with minimal effort, the company can reach a global audience through the medium of the Internet.
Online marketing has assumed mass popularity both with the big players and the small ones who are hopping on the IM bandwagon to get a slice of the online pie.
Some websites and blogs have been specifically designed for this purpose. The beauty of web marketing is that the information or data is available on click and newsletters and product updates can be sent to the user about the products he needs. If the user does not find what he wants, he can always go to the internet to get information on what he wants.
The single factor that can mar the consumer experience is the slow loading of the web pages. Customers will be easily miffed with a website that does not open up fast enough and loads pages slower than the competition.
Also, websites that have a lot of multimedia on them put greater pressure on the bandwidth which slows down the whole network. There is another negative point in the IM business and that is that the consumers are not able to feel or taste the products that they want to buy and therefore cannot make a better judgment on the quality of the product.
To counteract this, many websites have a money-back guarantee or a full refund in case the customer is not satisfied.
Perhaps the single biggest disadvantage and threat to online marketing is the scam of fraud and internet theft. There have been many reported cases where hackers have used the customer’s debit cards and cash cards to steal money and information online and this has led to many disasters.
To counter this problem, the websites have introduced safety precautions and practices so that the data transfer is secure and hacker-free. One of these methods is encryption. In encryption, data is converted into an unreadable form and this encrypted data is then sent over a channel where it is kept safe from the eyes of the hacker.
When the data reaches the other end of the channel, it is decrypted back to its original form. Cryptography is the science that deals with all of this.
The businesses like advertising, banking, music, etc have all been influenced by online marketing. The process of buying music or any stuff for that matter is made easier as we don’t need to visit a store anymore, and banks are carrying out their job too, like transferring funds, depositing, paying bills, & withdrawing, all through the online portal.
As a result, online advertising and marketing consume billions of dollars every year.