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.

1. Problem Recognition
2. Information Search
3. Evaluation of Alternatives
4. Purchase Decision
5. Purchase
6. Post-Purchase Evaluation

 

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.

Low involvement products - Products which are bought frequently and with a minimum of thought and effort because they are not of vital concern nor have any great impact on the consumer's lifestyle.

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!

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:

• Men
  • Men
  • Female partner
  • Parents
• Above average sized woman
  • Above average sized woman

 

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!

 

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.

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:

Customer benefit

User and buyer

High or low involvement

Buying process

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!

A search engine is a mechanism used to find information on the world wide web. These automated tools utilise very in-depth algorithms to decide what online content is applicable for a specific search query. The algorithms delve further in to “respectability” of the content via various channels to ascertain which of the applicable content is more important than the rest and thus how to rank the results.

 

The earliest search engines started showing their heads in the early 90’s, yet these where extremely simple when compared to our modern day examples. As the sheer volume of online content increase the search engines where faced with an ever increasing task of detecting, analysing and arranging masses of data and the modern search engine was born.

 

Now days, in the South African setting as well as across the majority of the globe, Google is the dominant search engine, with estimates of about 85% of the market share, the closest rival, Yahoo! coming in at 6%, followed by the Chinese search engine Baidu and Bing at 3%. In the context of American searches the values are slightly different with Google at 74%, Yahoo! at 17% and Bing at 9%. Of course there are a multitude of other options which are listed below.

 

Most modern search engines use the same mechanisms, a robot or spider that trawls the web following links and capturing data, an index where the found content is stored for later retrieval and the search algorithm that ranks the results.