Marketing Blog | Internet Marketing
Marketing Blog (10)This blog will attempt to reveal some of the different aspects that make up the developement of any good marketing plan. I will utilise our company (Go Fish Client Catchers) as an example wherever applicable.  So Paypal has arrived in South Africa in partnership with FNB. Great! But what does this mean? And what is Paypal? Paypal is an online payment system. It allows one to:
Fantastic, but what does this mean? And how, is this different to Netcash, Setcom, VCS or any of the other South African online payment solutions?
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Friday, 26 February 2010 09:20
Why Internet Marketing is superior to Off-line MarketingWritten by Alexi VontasWhen deciding which avenues to distribute your market offering through, it is important to take into account a few dimensions that will determine the best options for you. Your target market, the size thereof, your budget, your competition and many more will influence just how successful your marketing is and what your return on investment (ROI) is.
 There are a few reasons experts in the marketing field are moving more and more of their budgets into the online/internet marketing sphere, and the following more important reasons will now be discussed:
This advantage of internet marketing makes it almost unsurpassable in its accuracy and value, as you are only marketing to those customers that you want to attract. With traditional marketing methods, you show your message to millions of viewers and hope that the ones you are really targeting are taking in your advertising message. Internet and more specifically search engine marketing only shows your targeted marketing message to the people searching for your product, or those demographically chosen by you.
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Thursday, 25 February 2010 12:49
Viral Marketing and its Potential AdvantagesWritten by Alexi Vontas
Let’s start off by defining what exactly viral marketing is. Viral marketing is the act of promoting any information, service or products that other customers feel compelled to share with friends, family and colleagues. This makes it a very good referral seeing that people are endorsing and re-advertising the message. There are several ways in which to virally spread a brands name on the internet and get increased publicity for relatively low costs and sometimes for free. These will now be discussed.
Viral marketing using Emails: This does not refer to sending mails with virus’ attached, but rather the act of creating and sending out an email that people find funny, interesting, engaging or alarming, and in turn sending the email to all of their friends and email contacts. This leads to a situation where a single person can reach hundreds of thousands of people with no cost at all, in a relatively short time frame. This spreads the brand awareness and also creates brand personality. Social Media and Viral Marketing: Having an article on your website that stimulates people to share what they have seen or read is a great way to get traffic and brand awareness to your website and business. And where the social media aids in the viral spread of the content, is they allow the visitor to literally “share” or “send to a friend” from any specific webpage you want. For instance, if you read a funny joke on my website and I have Facebook, Twitter and Stumble-Upon Social media buttons on my site, you will be able to click a button and send to your friends on these social sites very easily.
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Tuesday, 30 March 2010 11:32
Is email marketing still an effective strategy?Written by Chris JacobyEmail marketing has been around for a while and is still one of the cheapest ways to communicate. Email marketing will definitely increase your business’ target for online audiences when used correctly. When marketing through email, you need to comply with federal regulations that affect all commercial enterprises. If this is done incorrectly it can get you company listed as a spam abuser and will affect your marketing strategy and your business negatively. When done correctly and the message to your target audience is crafted aptly, email marketing can help you deliver the right content to the right prospect at the right time in the selling cycle and continuously achieve high response rates from quality prospects.
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Market Segmentation is an invaluable aspect of most marketing plans, it allows you to target a receptive group of people within the population, thus avoiding the shotgun approach as far as possible and maximising your return on investment. The ideal individual to advertise to is one who will buy your product. So how do you work out who this is and how to target them? Well after reading and going through all the blogs I’ve posted on consumer analysis and giving it some thought you should have a vague idea of the demographics of your target market.
With classical press advertising you would merely target your demographics by choosing your channels carefully, skateboard magazines where a good place to market products designed for teenage boys etc. This has somewhat flowed over into online marketing, in the most basic form it can direct your placement of paid ads on 3rd party websites or through Google’s Content Network especially when utilising the CPM option. Social media sites often allow for far more detailed and specific demographic advertising options. These can be utilised very efficiently if your product appeals to a neatly defined target market. Often the level of segmentation available with most social advertising platforms is quite mind-blowing. Facebook has a well evolved advertising system with a multitude of different dimensions to choose from ad can sometimes yield impressive ROI.
Of course pay-per-click (PPC) search, such as Google’s AdWords, advertising has revolutionarised market segmentation as we knew it as it allows you to only target those who are actually actively looking for your product – the ideal target market. Yet you need to know what you’re doing to squeeze every ounce of selectivity out of it, I’ll go into this at a later stage in another blog post.
For now let me give you a list of some of the commonly used segmentation strata:
Obviously not all of the above would be applicable in every circumstance, but for every target market you have go through the list and narrow down your market segment. Each different market segment should then be analysed as to the viability of the advertising options available and the ROI that it promises. With online marketing you can often experiment inexpensively, which really takes a lot of the guess work out of it.
Wikipedia has a pretty elaborate entry on Market Segmentation if you'd like to read more.
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The buying process has 6 steps; each one plays an important role in any marketing strategy. Most of these steps can be targeted with a cleverly designed online marketing plan.
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Before you can decide whether your product is a high or low involvement product you need to understand what a high or low involvement product actually is!
These definitions are taken from LEGAmedia:
High involvement products - products for which the buyer is prepared to spend considerable time and effort in searching.
The marketing strategies for these products are very different. For a low involvement product all you need to do is merely make sure your product is available and easy to find, a perfect example is point of sale marketing – such as with gum, sure you might have your favourite gum, but if you can’t find it you’ll just by whatever’s right in front of you. No real point in spending vast amounts of your marketing budget trying to explain why yours is the only gum the client should by rather butter up the sellers to place yours at the top of the pile!
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This aspect of a consumer analysis investigates who users your product and who buys your product, in some cases they’ll be the same person, yet in many instances it may be very different people. A classic example of this is babies clothing and even men’s clothing which are most often bought by females.
I suggest you make a list of the users and the corresponding possible buyers. These buyers will become your marketing targets! Here is a simple example for men’s clothing:
As you can see we’ve expanded our marketing targets to far more than just the user opening up many more potential marketing avenues. By thinking outside the norm a bit here you can often drastically increase your sales!
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This aspect of consumer analysis answers the following questions:
What does your product do? Why would a customer benefit from using your product? How does it improve your client’s life? What needs category does your product fall into?
So how do you start? Well ask yourself the questions above and write down the answers for each product or service... Our Silver Package is a reasonably holistic online marketing package; it offers AdWords account management, organic growth management, monthly stats analysis & reporting and amongst others it also includes 3 hours worth of website maintenance. Of course you can break each component down further to the exact details, but it’s not necessary for this article. At the end of the day, simply put, our packages do one thing: Bring our clients more clients!
Once you’ve got a good idea of your product’s customer benefit you can have a look at what needs category it falls into. Needs categories where first described by Maslow in 1943, there are 5 different hierarchical tiers: Physiological, Safety, Loving / belonging, Esteem and Self-actualisation. See the image below and read the wikipedia entry for more details.
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When it comes to marketing a product or service one of the most important initial steps is to conduct a consumer analysis. This entails a number of aspects:
Market Segmentation
The aim of a consumer analysis is to assess who, what, when, how and why clients are buying your products, this allows you to plan your marketing much more successfully!
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