Imagine the following marketing journey online:
You are a book publisher and you are releasing a book by a new author. A potential
customer searches Google for her favourite genre and sees the sponsored advert
announcing the book launch. She clicks it to access the information, which takes
her to a microsite created especially for the launch, primed with keywords. The
page displays a link to your Twitter feed and another link that allows her to read
a sample chapter if she fills in her name and email address.
Curious about the book, she submits her details and immediately likes the material.
She writes about it in her own Twitter feed, cross-posting it on her Facebook
profile, including your UR L and Twitter username. Her friends immediately follow
the link, and some enter their details. One of them says he will attend the book
launch, and another pre-orders the book on Kalahari.net. Using your web analytics
tools, you are able to track how many people respond to her posting, and where
– and how – they engage.
She isn’t sure about the book herself and sends a question to your Twitter profile.
You and the author both respond within ten minutes, sparking a conversation
between you and another of her friends. Because she is engaging with you,
you decide to offer her 20% off the ebook version that she can read on her
smartphone. A few weeks later, you email her and her friends some bonus video
content that relates to the book, and let them know about another author whose
writing they may enjoy.
Does this sound like the kind of engagement you would like to have with your
customers? When you integrate all of the strategies in this course into a holistic
marketing plan, results like these are not only possible, they’re easy.
Online equivalents of traditional techniques
Physical office > website. Think of your website as the public face of your
company. Where before customers would visit or phone your office to find out
about your products or to make business arrangements, this can now all be
done on the official website. A website can offer additional features, like useful
resources, online shopping and customer support.
• Direct postal mail > email. Email is the targeted, personalised equivalent of
traditional posted direct mail. It has several advantages. Firstly, it is much
easier for the client to act on the information if you include a link or a fill-in
form for a competition. Secondly, it is easy for the customer to opt out of
the advertising, making it less intrusive – or they can share it further if they
find the content useful. Thirdly, it is much easier to construct a specifically
targeted list online, due to the wide availability of demographic information.
And finally, email marketing is cheaper and quicker, since there is no printing
or posting involved – which also makes following up and answering questions
easy.
advertising usually requires a large investment upfront for creation, and a
second large sum for placement. Online advertising carries a much lower risk,
since it can be fully controlled, changed, retracted and modified at any time.
The more targeted the advert, the more likely you are to generate qualified
leads and higher returns.
• Surveys, polls and market research > web analytics. The traditional way of
measuring the effectiveness of a marketing campaign was to take survey and
polls of consumers and to measure the effect on the company’s income; both
quite blunt and subjective measures. Web analytics are very different – they
allow absolute and precise measurement of every activity that your marketing
material is involved in, giving you the best picture of what works.
Traditional PR > web PR. Traditional PR usually happens behind closed doors,
as individual problems and complaints can be dealt with in private, or on the
large scale, through impersonal broadcast media. On the web, PR takes on an
entirely different dimension, because anyone can read what others are saying
about your company. If the message is bad, a substantial crisis can occur.
Brand management and PR are incredibly important on the web, because even
one dissident voice can have a marked effect.
• Word of mouth > viral. Traditional marketing relies heavily on word of mouth
to spread slogans, brand names and recommendations, and the web is no
different. However, online word of mouth has the tendency to spread virally,
as each agent is linked to exponentially increasing numbers of people down the
line. If every Facebook user has an average of 100 friends, then every profile
is just two steps away from 1 million others. Figures of this scale indicate just
why ideas can spread virally on the web.
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