Internet marketing - mixing technology with marketing guts
Internet marketing isn’t just about having a website, and it certainly isn’t just about having a “pretty” website. It’s something I keep telling people, and the issue came to the fore in the Trinidad Business Guardian’s recent articles about Internet marketing. While for the uninformed, this may not have been sufficiently articulated, the articles raised some important issues:
1. Internet marketing involves interactivity. It also includes e-mail marketing
2. Some local companies’ sites are not interactive, they don’t do e-commerce, and they don’t have e-mail marketing.
3. Companies suffer from a lack of keyword density, meaning their sites are barely visible and sometimes even invisible on search engines.
4. Companies are still stuck in the design phase; they think it’s all about having a good looking website.
Success story
. Five percent of Sacha’s sales are online with an average of 15 orders online per day. Kama Maharaj, CEO of Sacha Cosmetics, notes that Sacha Cosmetics are carried by Walmart, and that one of the reasons the giant, retail store agreed to carry the Sacha line was because it found it online. Sacha is a perfect example of a firm that has used a strong and strategic online presence to capitalise on international opportunities.
You’ve got 10 seconds to get off this website?
Web marketing consultant Earl Rennie made an interesting statement, as he outlined his belief that websites do not have to be “lovely” or interactive to be successful.
“It’s actually a strategy in certain self-service industries to have their websites built as plainly as possible to have people leave as soon as possible and success is actually measured by constantly reducing the average time spent on the Web site,” he says.
Now, on the one hand I can understand a company’s aim to help people use the self-service features on the site quickly, but on the other hand, I really don’t want to believe that companies strive for people to leave their sites as quickly as possible. So perhaps it was just a matter of how the gentleman was quoted. In the case of a self-service option on a website, I’d think that designing it in a user-friendly way would help the user to conduct their transaction and thus decrease any chance of frustration. The site would also have other features that encourage the user to explore other areas of the site. For example, take amazon.com. Amazon.com is a transactional site. You search for an item that you want, and you buy it. You also have the option to read about other people’s experiences with the product you’re about to purchase. You’re also offered other products that you might be interested in, and those that people with similar interests to you purchased. Amazon.com is designed to help you expedite your transaction, but at the same time there are other features like the wish list that encourage you to stay online, drinking in more of the brand’s energy.
Thus, while you seek to make your customers’ transactional experience easier, you’ve also got to embed elements, which will enhance the brand relationship experience.
Social media and Internet marketing
The increase of new media technologies and social media savvy internationally has increased consumers’ expectations for their online experience. It has also increased marketers’ ability to build relationships with their target audiences, increasing brand affinity and value resonance, assuming that a significant number of your stakeholders are online. Nevertheless, marketers need to avoid the blindness that overexcitement can cause. There are many tools, which can be used to market a company online and create viral buzz. There are numerous portals to your consumers and vice versa. What you must know is how to use them, and how to position your brand in the most strategic, technological touch points. These touch points will vary depending on your market and audiences’ characteristics.
In the new media environment, you’ve got to combine technology savviness with marketing brains and guts. This topic allows for a conversation that can go on. The great thing is that that’s one of the whole reasons for this blog.
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Comments
You are right. A lot of guts are needed if one wants to succeed in Internet marketing and advertising. A person needs to work hard and gamble in order to earn a profit. A passive marketeer will only lose his or her investment.
Very good article. I’m glad i found your blog Ms. Mc Intosh. Very interesting topics and…lol…my apologies for the way i sounded in the article in the Guardian.
“It’s actually a strategy in certain self-service industries to have their websites built as plainly as possible to have people leave as soon as possible and success is actually measured by constantly reducing the average time spent on the Web site.”
I was actually referring to sites that are solely developed to help clients or prospects answer their own questions. I didn’t mean that the main focus of some self-service websites was to get people off the site. I meant that it’s a strategy of most to reduce “customer visit length metrics” over time (e.g. increase the amount of visits under five/four/three/two/one minutes etc). This would mean that clients/prospects are locating the relevant information rather efficiently.
Of course in cases such as these there are several other factors that need to be taken into consideration, but those will definitely be out of the scope of this reply.
Best Regards,
Earl Rennie, CEC, CSEM
Website Marketing Strategy
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