Overview

Businesses may create a combination of advertising and promotion that meets their objectives for selling their goods and services online by using the four Ps of marketing and the principles of marketing strategy. Companies increasingly use a variety of online interaction channels, including social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, in addition to more conventional promotional techniques. Some businesses employ a customer-based strategy, while others adopt a product-based approach. By combining these approaches, businesses may offer clients a choice of methods thanks to the Web. More and more retailers are tailoring the online shopping experience for their clients by using information about their individual purchasing behavior.

On the web, market segmentation based on geographic, demographic, and psychographic data can be just as effective as it is offline. Even when the same consumer displays varied behavior throughout multiple visits to the company’s website, the Web provides businesses with the powerful additional capability of segmenting markets by customer behavior and life-cycle stage. These additional segmentation tools can result in one-to-one online marketing campaigns that are more relationship-focused than many non-online strategies.

To market goods and services online, businesses produce and distribute a variety of online advertisements, including displays, pop-ups, inline text, interstitials, rich media, and video. Alternatives to Web page advertisements include permission marketing and opt-in email. Users find context-sensitive text ads less invasive than other online advertising media, a form of online advertising that is quickly expanding. One of the fastest-growing categories of internet advertising at the moment is mobile advertising offered through individual applications and on the Web.

Many companies are using the Web to manage their relationships with customers. By understanding the nature of communication on the Web, companies can use it to identify and reach the largest possible number of qualified customers. Technology-enabled customer relationship management can provide better returns for businesses on the Web than the traditional unaided approaches of market segmentation and micromarketing.

Instead of the emotional branding strategies that are effective in mass media advertising, businesses on the Web can utilize rational branding. Through affiliate marketing and teamwork among brand owners, several online firms share and transmit brand benefits. Others are utilizing online social media viral marketing techniques to broaden the reach of their businesses and the size of their consumer groups.

For many businesses seeking new online consumers, effective search engine positioning and domain name selection can be crucial. The most crucial message in this chapter is that businesses need to include their Web marketing tools into a comprehensive, customer-focused marketing plan.

Marketing Mix

The four Ps of marketing—product, pricing, promotion, and place—are how most marketing courses group the key marketing considerations.

The tangible good or service that a business sells is called a “product.” The product is made up of various components, including quality, design, features, characteristics, and even packaging. Despite the fact that the product’s fundamental qualities are significant, the brand—the way consumers perceive the product—can be just as significant.

The price a consumer pays for a product constitutes the price component of the marketing mix. In recent years, marketing professionals have suggested that businesses should view price in a broader sense—that is, as the sum of all monetary expenses the consumer incurs (including transaction costs) to receive the goods. An estimate of the customer value acquired in the transaction is produced by deducting this total cost from the benefits that a customer receives from the goods. Through the use of online auctions, reverse auctions, and group buying techniques, the web can open up new possibilities for innovative pricing and price negotiations. These online opportunities are assisting businesses in discovering fresh approaches to enhancing client value.

Any strategy used to spread the word about the product is considered promotion. Decisions must be made about the product’s general promotion, public relations, personal selling, and advertising. There are several options for communicating with both current and potential consumers online. Organizations use social media, their websites, and email campaigns as communication channels to market their goods and services.

Marketing executives have long fantasized about a time when fast deliveries would give every client precisely what they wanted, when they wanted it. The requirement to have goods or services accessible in numerous areas is the issue of place, often known as distribution. Since the beginning of trade, corporations have struggled to deliver the right things to the right places at the right time to sell them. The Internet can undoubtedly be helpful, even though it cannot resolve all of these logistics and distribution issues. One type of digital goods that may be provided practically instantaneously through the Internet is information, news, software, music, video, and e-books. Businesses that sell goods that need to be sent have discovered that the Internet provides them with considerably better tools than they have previously had for inventory control and shipment tracking.

Product-Based Marketing Strategies

Many managers at firms consider their operations in terms of the goods and services they offer. This product-based marketing strategy makes commercial sense since businesses invest a lot of time, money, and effort in designing and producing their goods and services.

Many companies who started out as catalog-based merchants set up their websites from an internal perspective, i.e., in accordance with how they arranged their products on store shelves or printed catalog pages. This strategy can be successful if buyers visit these websites looking for a specific kind of product. However, users of these websites may not find them to be useful if they are searching for a specific product rather than to fulfill a specific need, such as remodeling a space or selecting a graduation gift.

Retailers are frequently advised by marketing consultants to create experiences on their websites that enable customers to accomplish their goals while viewing themselves as customers. This sometimes calls for a website layout that provides multiple shopping options. The next part explains how businesses might use this customer-based, or external viewpoint, approach to Web site design.

Customer-Based Marketing Strategies

Buyers and sellers can contact one another in a variety of ways thanks to the Internet. Compared to the one-way exchanges typical of traditional mass media channels like broadcast and print advertising, the communication structures on the Web can grow significantly more complicated. For instance, when a corporation moves its operations online, it can build a Web site that is adaptable enough to cater to the demands of several consumers. Companies can design their websites to fulfill the different demands of diverse types of clients rather than viewing them as collections of products.

A customer-based marketing strategy is an approach to website design that takes the unique needs of different sorts of clients into account.

Finding client groups with shared traits is the first stage in developing a customer-based marketing plan (such a group is often called a demographic). The site can be made more approachable and beneficial for each group by developing one that recognizes the distinctions between them and treats each in accordance. The majority of managers instinctively regard their Web sites as models of their operations, and they view those operations from their own internal perspective, which makes it challenging for organizations to achieve this. In order to adopt their own internal perspective, early university Web sites, for instance, were frequently structured around the internal features of the school (such as departments, colleges, and programs). Today, connections to specific Web pages created for different stakeholders, such as present students, prospective students, parents of students, possible donors, and faculty, may be found on the home pages of most universities. This design captures the exterior viewpoint of each potential user group for the website.

Market Segmentation

Finding potential clientele is the first step in selling to individuals. Every marketing strategy must include the selection of communication channels to convey the marketing message. An online-only firm may find it challenging to choose its media sources, as well as where to market and advertise, as a result of its lack of a physical presence. The perception that an online business projects in the media and on its website can be the only encounter a potential consumer has with it. It can be challenging for internet businesses, especially young ones, to persuade customers to trust them despite their lack of a physical presence.

Micromarketing is the term used to describe this method of focusing on very small market niches. However, when mass media techniques are employed to target extremely narrow market segments, the traditionally low cost per viewer of mass media advertising campaigns increases significantly. The effectiveness of micromarketing methods was limited by this cost increase. Although micromarketing was an advance over mass media advertising, it continued to employ the same fundamental strategy and was subject to its flaws.

More than just matching advertising messages to market groupings is done by businesses. Additionally, they create a sales environment for their good or service that fits the target market group. In the real world, store layout and design are frequently targeted at particular market segments. You may see how the targeted sector affects the colors, displays, lighting, background music, and even the attire worn by salespeople simply walking around a shopping mall.

Market Segmentation on the Web

Retail stores in the real world have a finite amount of floor and display space. These restrictions frequently require physical establishments to choose just one message to convey. There are few exceptions, such as a huge department store that employs display space and lighting differently in each department; still, smaller retail establishments typically pick the one image that appeals to the majority of their clients. Online merchants can offer distinct virtual locations for certain market segments. Since the 1950s, when door-to-door salespeople were popular, the Internet has provided marketers with the best chance for highly tailored interactions with clients.