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Whether your business is a solo operation providing a simple service or a retail organization selling hundreds of products, it's important today that you have some kind of e-marketing strategy in place. E-marketing is definitely on the rise.
Why use e-marketing?
- Reach customers who have now moved online. Over 600 million people use the web regularly.
- Get more bang for the buck than traditional shotgun-style marketing methods such as advertising and public relations; e-marketing enables you to better target prospective customers.
- Improve your reach for a narrow customer base; this allows you to access customers outside your geographic region.
- Lower marketing costs.
E-marketing tools
Marketing is defined as delivering your sales messages to customers through communications channels they most rely on to obtain information.
Businesses rarely buy one-size-fits-all marketing campaigns, and hope they work. Instead, they assess various channels to find the appropriate vehicle. These e-marketing tools now include:
1. E-mail: electronic version of direct marketing. This is a popular way to deliver a specific message to prospective customers.
2. Webinars: For product demo or to explain your offering, these seminars delivered online are becoming a common marketing method.
3. Video: If you're a manufacturer or service provider, you can increase sales by providing prospects a short video demonstrating product features on your website.
4. E-newsletters: Electronic newsletters, delivered via the Web, or placed on a website, can help you create communities of customers and attract prospects.
5. Blogs: The use of Weblogs, or online diaries, is now growing in the online marketing community; however, if you opt for this communications vehicle, you need to keep the blog updated with useful information. A blog can allow users to comment and provide insight about your product instantly or even create a buzz about your product.
6. Expertise material: White papers and case studies are growing as a marketing method. Web users place more trust in useful and educational material than they do in blatant sales messages
7. Website optimization: A properly designed website, whether simply informational or selling products, can help you win business.
8. Search engine optimization: About 80% of e-commerce is generated through search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN. Users need to be able to find your site easily.
9. Pay-per-click advertising: This involves paying for specific keywords on search engines. The process can be expensive if done randomly; be sure that you use appropriate keywords that are meaningful to users.
10. Online information distribution: Many websites deliver customized information and news to customers who submit profiles of their needs and subjects of interest. E-marketers can use these sites to deliver targeted messages.
E-marketing methods
E-marketing is a form of low-cost marketing favoured by many businesses. Keep these factors in mind:
- Understand your business needs. Service business will use different marketing techniques than a product-based business because the buying behaviour of its customers is different. Similarly, a product that is destined to a narrow market will customize their message than a business that sells to a wider market.
- Make choices. E-marketing means ignoring some prospective customers; it's the opposite of the old mass-marketing system which emphasized sending sales messages to as many people as possible. The good news is that targeted customers have a higher likelihood of buying.
- Work with fewer customers. E-marketing often involves several small market niches, which means sending messages to far fewer people but who have greater propensity to buy. It's crucial then to know your targeted audience intimately.
- Measure and analyse the efficiency of your tools. Readily available software packages will help you test techniques, gather information on buyer preferences, and refine offers to better appeal to those preferences.
- Be innovative and flexible. Try new techniques, measure performance, and then adjust your website and marketing tools to better reflect results.
- Be entertaining. Web users tend to prefer information presented in an entertaining or novel way. So you could use humour, satire or visual images to gain attention.
B2B e-Marketing
While much attention is focused on sales of consumer products on the Web, the reality is that only about 25% of online commerce involves sales of products to consumers. The remainder of online activity is e-business or business-to-business.
The Web has become the information library of choice for business customers who are scanning the market for potential goods or services. As a result, a sophisticated methodology has evolved for online marketing to businesses.
Differences between business buyers and consumer buyers
- Businesses often use the Web to conduct research, while consumers tend to look for specific products. Marketers feed this B2B behaviour by providing useful or educational material to business browsers.
- When marketing to businesses, generating sales leads is more important than conducting transactions. With consumers, the opposite is usually true.
- Business customers are usually beginning their shopping experience when they go online and are in the process of gathering general information; consumers are often near the end of that experience and are narrowing down their options or comparing choices.
- The large majority of businesses use the Google search engine to conduct research; consumers tend to use other engines like Yahoo and MSN.
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