Online Marketing: A New Era in Marketing
Online marketing is a new era in marketing. Social media and search engines are gaining popularity with the increase of smartphone users and easy accessibility to the internet. Recent records show that almost 3.5 billion people across the globe access the internet (Internet Live Stat, 2016).
Google, the world’s most widely used search engine is accessible by all those 3.5 billion users. The amount of data collected by Google everyday is unimaginable. This data collected is of great importance to every marketer as customers, today search every requirement before making a purchase.
In addition, Facebook and Twitter are the big social networking websites through which people worldwide put their views forward. In the 3rd quarter of 2016, Facebook has 1.79 billion users worldwide. On the other hand, Twitter has 315 million users in the 3rd quarter of 2016 (Statistics Portal, 2016). Again these are some big numbers valuable for marketers.
Hence, online marketing is a marketing activity which directly interacts with the customers through the medium of the internet. It acquires and analysis the big data to meet customer requirements rather than sell specific products (Rust, Moorman & Bhalla, 2016).
Traditional Marketing vs Online Marketing
Traditional marketing engaged itself in mass market, mass promotion and impersonal communication with customers. Marketers’ centric focus was on the products rather than the customers(Rust, Moorman & Bhalla, 2010). The strategy adopted was the push strategy, pushing the products and brands to the customers.
On the contrary, online marketing is more customer centric marketing. The data acquired by marketers from the various online websites help them know more about the customers. Online marketing applies the pull strategy into business focusing on serving the customers to gain loyalty.
The communication process under product driven marketing is one sided. But, customer driven marketing is a two way communication process with the help of the internet (Rust, Moorman & Bhalla, 2010).
Role of Social Media in Online Marketing
As mentioned earlier, firstly, online marketing focuses on direct customer interactions to build long term relations. And secondly, social media allows people to participate actively putting their views forward in form of blogs and posts.
Social media networks allow marketers to learn about their target market preferences. It also provides them data about the popularity of their product and services in the market (Kumar et al, 2012).
In addition, social media is also a major advertising platform. Facebook is the most preferred media as ads displayed cannot be escaped by the users. This in return ends up grabbing the attention of the users. Advantage of promoting via social media is that marketers penetrate into existing customer’s social network if they wish to spread the ad. The mechanism is also known as broadcast mechanism (Kumar et al, 2012).
Furthermore, Facebook and Twitter are the major influencing websites. For this reason, word of mouth publicity has increased immensely. With the data available with the marketers, they are able to identify the influencer. The marketers target these positive influencers to promote their message. In this manner, the most use of social media is made in online marketing.
Role of Google in Online Marketing
Over 1.2 trillion searches per year and 3.5 billion searches per day is processed by Google (Internet Live Stats, 2016). Reading these numbers one can imagine the amount of data Google has in its database. This data is the data directly generated by the customers and is the primary data of great value to the marketers. This data generated can literally answer every doubt of the marketers on the market status and customer expectations. It helps marketing managers explicitly take their information from Google to increase growth.
Moreover, since, many people search daily on Google, it has provided a platform for companies to display search ads. Search ads are the pay per click ads. Basically, every time, a customer types a query, Google will trigger the advertisement on the result page. The ad of course should match the keyword criteria that will enable Google to trigger the ad. The advantage of Google ads is that, firstly, the ad is in the search link format. And secondly. many users do not know what they want from their search. Hence, the likelihood, that a user will click on the ad will increase. Once the user clicks the ad, Google will then direct them to the companies landing page creating web traffic. Increase in the web traffic may generate chances of customer conversion.
For this reason, many companies have special employees to work on optimising the websites SEO. These officers along with the other functional team work in close proximity to match Google’s criteria. Expected web traffic can only increase if the ads displayed is first in the page (Brinker & McLellan, 2014).
In conclusion, all things considered, online marketing has a vast scope. It has brought a transformation in the marketing trends from being customer driven to becoming product driven.
References
Internet Live Stats: Internet Usage & Social Media Statistic, Internet Live Stats, Retrieved from: http://www.internetlivestats.com/ on 14 November 2016.
Rust R., Moorman C. and Bhalla G., (2010) Rethinking Marketing: Now companies can interact directly with cutomers, 94-101.
Statistics Portal: Social Media Statistic, Statistics Portal, Retrieved from: https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/ on 14 November 2016.
Statistics Portal: Social Media Statistic, Statistic Portal, Retrieved from: https://www.statista.com/statistics/282087/number-of-monthly-active-twitter-users/ on 14 November 2016.
Kumar V. and Sundaram B., (2012) Social Media Evolution: An Evolution Road Map to Winning with Social Media Marketing, 4-7
Brinker S. and Mclellan L., (2014) The Rise of Chief Marketing Technologist, 82-85