Cheerleaders at a pep rally

Promotion is one of the four aspects of marketing. The other three parts of the marketing mix are product management, pricing, and distribution. Promotion involves disseminating information about a product, product line, brand, or company.

Promotion comprises four subcategories:

• Advertising
• Personal selling
• Sales promotion
• Publicity and public relations

The specification of these four variables creates a promotional mix or promotional plan. A promotional mix specifies how much attention to pay to each of the four subcategories, and how much money to budget for each. A promotional plan can have a wide range of objectives, including: sales increases, new product acceptance, creation of brand equity, positioning, competitive retaliations, or creation of a corporate image.

Example

The publicity for the 40th anniversary of the 1966 NCAA Basketball championship included

1. The renaming of a city street
2. A tie-in with an autobiography with the same title
3. The screening of a film with the same title
4. The release of a breakfast cereal box with coordinated materials
5. A pep rally on a university campus
6. Media coverage

Example 2: Veranda Park

A new residential development, Veranda Park, while under construction in Orlando, Florida, USA was promoted on-site using adverisements on the construction-site fence known as Fence Mesh. A brief look at how the marketing team met the basic marketing objectives:

1. Sales Increases

Prospective customers driving or walking in proximity of the outer perimeter of the new development were made aware of the real estate available for purchase.

2. New Product Acceptance

The public was made aware of the new construction a long time before it was finished. This gave the public a chance to gradually accept the new look of this area of the neighborhood. Rather than looking at piles of dirt and construction equipment, the fence mesh treated the public to a much more thoughtful view.

3. Brand Equity

The fence mesh built brand equity by prominently portraying the development’s name in a pleasing and artistic fashion. Compare this development to one without such a fence advertisement. Prospective buyers are much more likely to remember a development with fence mesh advertising over one which does not.

4. Positioning

The fence created an extremely distinct image of the high quality type of development under construction by use of images and text describing the available services and types of real estate.

5. Corporate Image

It would be fair to say that a corporation which cared enough about the appearance of their construction site to design, install and maintain a tasteful and artistic representation of their finished product on such a large scale might be perceived in a positive light.

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e-Marketing is a type of marketing that can be defined as achieving objectives through the use of electronic communications technology such as Internet, e-mail, Ebooks, database, and mobile phone. It is a more general term than online marketing which is limited to the use of internet technology to attain marketing objectives.

Dave Chaffey, working from a relationship marketing perspective, has defined e-marketing as:

Applying Digital technologies which form online channels (Web, e-mail, databases, plus mobile/wireless & digital TV) to contribute to marketing activities aimed at achieving profitable acquisition and retention of customers (within a multi-channel buying process and customer lifecycle) through improving our customer knowledge (of their profiles, behaviour, value and loyalty drivers), then delivering integrated targeted communications and online services that match their individual needs. (Source: [1] with permission of the author)

Chaffey’s definition emphasises that:

1. It should not be the technology that drives e-marketing, but the business returns from gaining new customers and maintaining relationships with existing customers.
2. It also emphasises how e-marketing does not occur in isolation, but is most effective when it is integrated with other communications channels such as telemarketing, direct-mail, personal selling, advertising, publicity, sales promotion, and other promotional techniques.
3. Online channels should also be used to support the whole buying process from pre-sale to sale to post-sale and further development of customer relationships where this is appropriate.
4. It should be based on knowledge of customer needs developed by researching their characteristics, behaviour, what they value, and what keeps them loyal.
5. The web and e-mail communications should be personally tailored to individual buyers based on the information obtained in the research.

References

• Smith, P.R. and Chaffey, D. (2005) eMarketing eXcellence: at the heart of eBusiness. Butterworth Heinemann, Oxford, UK. 2nd edition. http://davechaffey.com/E-marketing

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Internet marketing is the use of the Internet to advertise and sell goods and services. Internet Marketing includes pay per click advertising, banner ads, e-mail marketing, search engine marketing (including search engine optimization), blog marketing, and article marketing.

Definition and Scope

Internet marketing is a component of electronic commerce. Internet marketing can include information management, public relations, customer service, and sales. Electronic commerce and Internet marketing have become popular as Internet access is becoming more widely available and used. Well over one third of consumers who have Internet access in their homes report using the Internet to make purchases.

History

Internet marketing first began in the early 1990s as simple, text-based websites that offered product information. It then evolved into advertisements complete with graphics. The most recent step in this evolution was the creation of complete online businesses that use the Internet to promote and sell their services and goods.

Business Models and Formats

Internet marketing is associated with several business models. The main models include business-to-business and business-to-consumer (B2C). B2B consists of companies doing business with each other, whereas B2C involves selling directly to the end consumer. When Internet marketing first began, the B2C model was first to emerge. B2B transactions were more complex and came about later. A third, less common business model is peer-to-peer (P2P), where individuals exchange goods between themselves. An example of P2P is Napster, which is built upon individuals sharing files.

Internet marketing can also be seen in various formats. One version is name-your-price (e.g. Priceline.com). With this format, customers are able to state what price range they wish to spend and then select from items at that price range. With find-the-best-price websites (e.g. Hotwire.com), Internet users can search for the lowest prices on items. A final format is online auctions (e.g. Ebay.com) where buyers bid on listed items.

Benefits

Some of the benefits associated with Internet marketing include the availability of information. Consumers can log onto the Internet and learn about products, as well as purchase them, at any hour. Companies that use Internet marketing can also save money because of a reduced need for a sales force. Overall, Internet marketing can help expand from a local market to both national and international marketplaces.

Limitations

Limitations of Internet marketing create problems for both companies and consumers. Slow Internet connections can cause difficulties. If companies put too much information on their website, Internet users may struggle to load the web page. Also, Internet marketing does not allow shoppers to touch or try-on items before purchasing them.

Security Concerns

For both companies and consumers that participate in online business, security concerns are very important. Many consumers are hesitant to buy items over the Internet because they do not trust that their personal information will remain private. Recently, some companies that do business online have been caught giving away or selling information about their customers. Several of these companies have guarantees on their websites, claiming customer information will be private. By selling customer information, these companies are breaking their own, publicized policy. Some companies that buy customer information offer the option for individuals to have their information removed from the database (known as opting out). However, many customers are unaware that their information is being shared and are unable to stop the transfer of their information between companies.

Security concerns are of great importance and online companies have been working hard to create solutions. Encryption is one of the main methods for dealing with privacy and security concerns on the Internet. Encryption is defined as the conversion of data into a form called a cipher. This cipher cannot be easily intercepted unless an individual is authorized by the program or company that completed the encryption. In general, the stronger the cipher, the better protected the data is. However, the stronger the cipher, the more expensive encryption becomes.

Effects on Industries

Internet marketing has had a large impact on several industries including music, banking, and flea markets. In the music industry, many consumers have begun buying and downloading MP3s over the Internet instead of simply buying CDs. The debate over the legality of downloading MP3s has become a major concern for those in the music industry.

Internet marketing has also affected the banking industry. More and more banks are offering the ability to perform banking tasks online. Online banking is believed to appeal to customers because it is more convenient then visiting bank branches. Currently, over 50 million U.S. adults now bank online. Online banking is now the fastest-growing Internet activity. The increasing speed of Internet connections is the main reason for the fast-growth. Of those individuals who use the Internet, 44% now perform banking activities over the Internet.

As Internet auctions have gained popularity, flea markets are struggling. Unique items that could previously be found at flea markets are being sold on Ebay.com instead. Ebay.com has also affected the prices in the industry. Buyers and sellers often look at prices on the website before going to flea markets and the Ebay.com price often becomes what the item is sold for. More and more flea market sellers are putting their items up for sale online and running their business out of their homes.

Recent Issues

In November 2004, a lawsuit was filed against Bonzi Buddy software. The lawsuit alleged that Bonzi’s banner ads were deceptive. These ads often looked like Microsoft Windows message boxes. Internet users would run across the ads and when they attempted to close the boxes, they found themselves redirected to a website determined by Bonzi.

On May 27, 2005, Bonzi Buddy agreed to change the format of its ads so they did not resemble Windows message boxes. The boxes will now contain the word “Advertisement” so computer users know what they are looking at. The boxes will also no longer carry buttons that do not perform the correct actions.

Sales tax issues have also recently become debated. The current laws require that buyers of online products pay their state all due taxes on these goods at the end of the year, along with their other state taxes. However, most consumers do not appear to be making these payments. Thirteen states have now begun encouraging Internet businesses to collect sales tax on every sale. These states are currently not forcing the companies to collect the tax. However, it appears that if companies do not begin collecting the sales tax on their own, states will begin forcing the companies to do so. The states are claiming that each year they lose $15 billion in unpaid sales taxes associated with online purchases.

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Smith and Chaffey (2001) describe five key online marketing activities (the ’5Ss’) which can be applied by an organisation to implement various online marketing tactics. For example, for an e-newsletter, the 5Ss are:

• Sell – Grow sales (the e-newsletter often acts as both a customer acquisition tool and a retention tool – the lastminute.com e-newsletter has this dual role)
• Serve – Add value (give customers extra benefits online such as an online exclusive offer or more in-depth information about your products or the industry sector)
• Speak – Get closer to customers by creating a dialogue, asking questions through online research surveys and learning about customers’ preferences through tracking – which content are people most interested in.
• Save – Save costs (of print and post if you have a traditional offline e-newsletter can you reduce print runs or extend it to those customers you can’t afford to communicate with)
• Sizzle – Extend the brand online. A newsletter keeps the brand ‘front-of-mind’ and helps reinforce brand values. Added value can also be delivered by the e-newsletter by informing and entertaining customers.

Capturing attention of potential customers can be as simple as advertising using some of the new advertising tools the online world provides, such as advertising on search engines, but it can also be about configuring more remarkable methods that tend to spread across many sites and capturing the imagination of many people in the process. There are at least three major configurations of links and tools that have been used to capture attention online: funnel building, buzz marketing and cool tools.

Building a sales funnel requires working with search engine optimization, email newsletter distribution, discussion board entries, advertisements, affiliate activities and more. In fact, any way that additional links can be provided so that a potential customer can begin a conversation with a business, is educated about that business’ products/services, or is provided with concepts and propositions that will eventually lead to a sale. A funnel is usually laid down over time and is the result of continuous activity of marketers in online activities.

Buzz marketing tends to be a much quicker process and tends to involve less activity on behalf of marketers and requires attention of people online to spread by word-of-mouth, word-from-keyboards, to be fascinated or intrigued. Purple cow was sold largely through buzz marketing that spread by blogs relatively quickly.

Another tactic of gaining attention online is through the development and release of a cool tool. A cool tool is something that captures the imagination of the online browsing public and it is thought to be so cool that it should be shared with online friends. This could be a video clip, standalone software that is cute such as a cartoon character that lives on a users screen, or some other device that is used often for a specific purpose, such as 3Ms Post-it Notes.

Right in the middle of a new marketing practice is eBay with its datafeed marketing. Essentially a store owner sets up his/her data in eBay and then by way of feeds make this data available to advertising avenues, such as Froogle, Yahoo Product Search and about another twenty of thirty other sites that take datafeeds. All the advertising feed services point the prospective purchaser to the eBay auction. This is perhaps a little like building a sales funnel as described above, however, it uses a specific technology that enables ease of use.

Marketing on the internet requires that one be found using keyword searches or some form of online advertising. In any case the trick to being successful in Online Marketing is being found within the top 30 search results. There are 3 ways that one can be found. 1.) natural search engine ranking (70% of searchers will skip over sponsored results and start with the naturally ranked sites) 2.) Paid inclusion and 3.) Pay per click. Due to the extreme difficulty of achieving a natural high ranking on a major search engine most companies opt for #’s 2 and 3 for their online marketing. Unfortunately the 3rd option is very costly and only the most well heeled companies can afford to market online via pay per click.

What is true of Online Marketing today is that one must pay to play. Since the dot com bust several years ago search engines have discerned that in order to survive and thrive they must generate significant revenue. At first the hope was that banner advertising would be sufficient to fill the search engine coffers but it soon became evident that searchers did not respond to banners. It then became evident that there were 2 primary ways to create income for search engines and online directories. Thus paid inclusion and pay per click were born!

Recently potential greed-related challenges have emerged. There are companies that create false hits and traffic. Most recently Google has been sued for click fraud. [1] Whether or not the charges prove to be true, actions like this make people think twice about using pay per click as part of their online marketing package.

Semantic logic will allow searchers to use not just keywords to search, but rather they will search using common language. This is a big departure from the crude Boolean logic which has served the Internet searching community for the last decade.

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When marketing online, the general four step process of marketing is still the guiding idea, in the online world the character of marketing becomes more deeply a conversation between a marketer and a market-of-one a concept that is central to The cluetrain manifesto. In such a role as a communicator, the online marketer is in a position to build awareness of her/his company or business in more personal terms than otherwise, and in so doing enables a more human conversation. Such conversations tend to be more warts and all and should establish confidence of the potential purchaser in the potential vendor.

Smith and Chaffey (2001) claim that Internet technology can be used to focus marketing on the customer, while at the same time linking to other business operations so as to achieve profitability. This can be done by:

• Identifying – the Internet be used for marketing research to find out customers’ needs and wants;

• Anticipating – the Internet provides an additional channel by which customers can access information and make purchases – understanding this demand is key to governing resource allocation to e-marketing. For example, low-cost airline has an online revenue contribution of over 90% since demand for a standardised product online is so high.

• Satisfying – a key success factor in e-marketing is achieving customer satisfaction through the electronic channel, this raises issues such as is the site easy to use, does it perform adequately, what is the standard of associated customer service and how are physical products dispatched?

Detractors of this concept of human-to-human contact through online conversations suggest that companies are going to be careful about marketing in this manner and perhaps will never really have honest and open conversations as the interests of companies and businesses are not the interests of potential purchasers. The cluetrain manifesto allows for this type of thinking suggesting that businesses when marketing in this manner need to be thinking about more than just making money; if a business is thinking only about making money, it will become apparent in close online conversations and the market will treat that business in whatever manner it may as markets can now talk to each other through the same means marketers talk to potential customers.

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

Online Marketing is marketing on the Internet. It is a type of e-marketing, which in turn is a type of e-commerce. While at first the confusion of experiments, beta versions of websites, search engines and other online devices cause marketers to consider this world of the Internet unknowable and perhaps too unpredictable, there is now a growing body of work to which marketers are now paying attention in order to develop online marketing programs. The most known tools to marketers in the mid 2000s are currently tools grouped into 2 fields: online advertising and search engine optimization. E-marketing tools used to drive visitors to a web site include:

However, marketing online is simply not offline marketing applied to a new online world. Online marketing has a slightly different character and purpose as indicated in such seminal works as The cluetrain manifesto, Purple cow, Permission marketing, and other texts of smaller nature compiled in blogs and news sites.

References

• Smith, P.R. and Chaffey, D. (2001) eMarketing eXcellence: at the heart of eBusiness. Butterworth Heinemann, Oxford, UK.
• Internet Marketing for Less Than $500 Per Year. ISBN 1885068697
• Building Your E-Bay Traffic The Smart Way. ISBN 0814472699
• The Online Copywriters Handbook. ISBN 0658020994
• The Complete Idiots Guide to Online Marketing. ISBN 078972037X

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