The World Wide Web has become almost synonymous with online marketing, with most services that we can think of, being available online. Starting from booking tickets for railways, shopping for products to even raising requests for information under RTI act, everything and anything that we do in life can be done online. So how do we relate marketing to the concept of online shopping? Well, the answer to this question is not very simple. So let’s dive a little deeper into it.
Marketing is essential for promoting any activity, service or product. Without marketing it would be very difficult to let the consumers know about any product or service. Traditionally marketing has been done using Television advertisements, Banner advertisements, and through other time tested methods. How exactly does this work? Well the idea is very simple. The company that intends to market its product generally hires an advertising agency in most cases to create a campaign around the new product or the brand itself and then displays these ads through various channels.
What is this supposed to do?[/b]
Well for starters, it creates brand awareness in the minds of the consumers that a particular brand exists. Now there can be 2 different situations.
Situation 1 when the company/brand we are talking about is completely new to the market, in which case, such brand awareness campaign becomes all the more important. Remember the “Home Trade[/b]” ads with the punch line “Life Means More[/b]”. There were 3 different ads made for the company featuring Sachin Tendulkar, Hritik Roshan and Shah Rukh Khan. The ad didn’t focus on what the company was all about, and for many months, all people could think about was that it was going to be something big. It later turned out to be a big scam. However the fact still remains that it got the audience attention that it wanted. This combined with the fact that 3 of the top professionals in the Indian Arena were endorsing it, created great discussion around the brand. People instantly became aware of the brand “Home Trade” along with the catchy punch line “Life Means More”. So this is how a new company or brand can benefit from its marketing initiative. This definitely helps the company to be more competitive by getting into the mind of the audience.
How? [/b]
Let’s say you are a new brand promoting a new men’s deodorant. Now you rope in a big celebrity to endorse your product and you do some brand awareness marketing campaign around that product. Next time when a consumer goes to the store to replenish his stock of deodorant, and looks at your can, he is sure to recollect the campaign and would be more inclined to buy this new product. How you retain that customer in the future depends on the quality of your product and also on your additional marketing campaigns. This brings us to the second situation in which marketing is involved.
Situation 2 is essentially for companies that have already been in the market for quite some time and want to promote a new product or want to retarget the audience with an existing product. In such a situation, the company already has the brand recall that it needs. However, the ad helps trigger not only brand recall even more, but also helps in promoting the new product. This is reason you would probably see the “Parryware” ad during a cricket match and wonder “Why the hell are they showing me the ad of a company I already know about and that too in the middle of a cricket match?[/b]” What the ad did was to just nudge your memory a bit (in case you knew about the company) or ingrained the company name in your subconscious. (In case you are an 8 yr old kid. Apparently kids can also influence the purchasing decisions of their parents)
However with traditional media there is an inherent disadvantage. I think you might have already thought about it by this time. Targeting the right set of consumers(Even though traditional media marketing is primarily intended to improve the brand awareness in addition to promoting the product itself, these forms of advertising are slowly losing sheen because of the inability to target specific consumers).
This is where digital media/online media comes into the picture. Over the last decade there has been tremendous improvement in internet technologies and business has been the main driver for this growth and improvement.
The story of online/internet shops has been like a domino effect. It started out with pizza delivery in the US where customers could order Pizzas online and gradually every other service/product that we can think about can be bought online (well almost!!). Everything changed with the entry of Google Search. Google’s revolutionary search engine was a game changer. Not only did it help the browsers to find what they were looking for in the internet, it changed the way marketing was done on the internet. Ok, let’s back up a little. So after some companies (more like individuals ) came up with their virtual world internet shops(others started to create their own websites and link to some other websites), they came up with the idea of marketing through their online shops(and websites). They started to offer space on their website/online shop pages for a fee to other website owners to put up a link that went to their websites. That was how online advertising saw the light of day. It worked well for the quite some time, until browsers stopped using these links to navigate to the websites.
Why?[/b]
Same problem – The marketing ads didn’t correspond to something the users wanted.
Unlike TV where viewers keep watching the ads (because they are so engrossed in the movie, the cricket match, the football match, or the MTV roadies), in case of internet, browsers could just ignore the ads that dwelled on the sides and corners of the website. Marketers tried to make the ads more interesting and engaging with new technologies and graphics, but that didn’t help much. That was the time when Google saved the day with the concept of contextual marketing advertisement and soon others followed suit. The technology itself was there, but Google provided a platform (Double Click) to it and brought an umbrella of online shops/websites/blogs into its advertising platform.
This has ushered in the era of more meaningful ads on the internet. You get ads for what you are looking for, many times without you even realizing it. Imagine this[/b]:
You are looking for cheap air tickets to your home town and you provide the price range for tickets in a ticket booking website, which is affiliated to the Google’s ad network agency. You don’t end up getting a good deal and decide to look later/book railway tickets. All this contextual information (your ticket budget, the fact that you didn’t end up purchasing a ticket at the current prices, and most importantly the browser id that you used to visit the website) are now in the network. Don’t worry though because no one can identify you as mr.x or ms.y with this information. After all it’s a browser id we are talking about. Continuing with the hypothetical situation, let’s say you browse a sports website or an entertainment website (which are also part of the Google ads network) in your free time and now the travel portal that you had visited has some discounts going on for the air route you were looking for. BAM!!!
You get an advertisement that offers you that discount. You click though that ad and end up purchasing an online ticket. The travel portal sold a ticket and didn’t need to pay for an expensive commercial featuring a superstar. That’s the magic of contextual advertising. On the internet, marketing is not limited to contextual ads. If you are a global brand promoting different products in different geographical locations, you can reach out to the different consumers with different products using geo – targeted ads. If you want to attract the consumers who visited your online shop and never came back, you can retarget them with attractive offers. YES! You can do that too. Added to all this, the biggest advantage of the internet marketing platform is the accurate tracking that you get.
What does that mean?[/b]
Well ideally when you invest say Rs. 650 million on a TV marketing campaign, you generally guess that the improvement in sales might have been because of the campaign. There is no accurate way of finding out how many consumers actually watched that advertisement. All you can do is make an educated guess based on the TRP of the shows during which the ad was displayed. Makes it really hard to get your ROI figures doesn’t it.
On the other hand, with online marketing, you get near about accurate figures of the amount of traffic that is coming to your website from the various online marketing channels (read web analytics tools like Adobe Omniture Site Catalyst, Google Analytics, Web Trends, etc.), how many of them ended up purchasing, and how many of them looked at the ads.
How is that going to help?[/b]
The million dollar question. Well most importantly it will help you decide where not[/b] to put your hard earned marketing dollars. You can quickly revise your marketing spend and look at the results and continue to optimize the process.
With social media now spreading the word for most companies that satisfy their customers, marketing has become a totally different ball game. Now we have new rich media websites and ads that allow the browsers to interact with them and thus improve the audience engagement unlike television ads where the customer has to just stare at the ads.
What’s next?[/b]
With Google TV round the corner, we can all soon expect to see a totally different picture in the marketing space. No more waiting for the shows in between those gruesome commercial breaks. Ignore them all, and look at ads that pop up and interest you. With so many new genre of devices (read ipads, kindle, iphones and the smart phones) and new technologies (3G, 4G on the way, augmented reality), we would soon witness new marketing techniques and media.
Case Study:[/b]
Viral Marketing works really well in the online world, where the “word of mouth” across social media websites and networking using friends can used to improve the brand awareness of a company.
Samsung recently initiated an online marketing campaign for the promotion of their Note PCs (read Galaxy Tab). The campaign aimed at improving brand interactions by making the users participate in an online contest and making the users refer the contest to their friends. Mass Portals like MSN , Yahoo and Rediff were used in the online promotion using banner advertisement. The participants in the contest had to answer simple questions in order to win a Samsung Note PC. It was a grand success with over 50,000 participants taking part in the contest.
Source: http://www.quasar.co.in/pdfs/samsungcasestudy.pdf
Marketing is essential for promoting any activity, service or product. Without marketing it would be very difficult to let the consumers know about any product or service. Traditionally marketing has been done using Television advertisements, Banner advertisements, and through other time tested methods. How exactly does this work? Well the idea is very simple. The company that intends to market its product generally hires an advertising agency in most cases to create a campaign around the new product or the brand itself and then displays these ads through various channels.
What is this supposed to do?[/b]
Well for starters, it creates brand awareness in the minds of the consumers that a particular brand exists. Now there can be 2 different situations.
Situation 1 when the company/brand we are talking about is completely new to the market, in which case, such brand awareness campaign becomes all the more important. Remember the “Home Trade[/b]” ads with the punch line “Life Means More[/b]”. There were 3 different ads made for the company featuring Sachin Tendulkar, Hritik Roshan and Shah Rukh Khan. The ad didn’t focus on what the company was all about, and for many months, all people could think about was that it was going to be something big. It later turned out to be a big scam. However the fact still remains that it got the audience attention that it wanted. This combined with the fact that 3 of the top professionals in the Indian Arena were endorsing it, created great discussion around the brand. People instantly became aware of the brand “Home Trade” along with the catchy punch line “Life Means More”. So this is how a new company or brand can benefit from its marketing initiative. This definitely helps the company to be more competitive by getting into the mind of the audience.
How? [/b]
Let’s say you are a new brand promoting a new men’s deodorant. Now you rope in a big celebrity to endorse your product and you do some brand awareness marketing campaign around that product. Next time when a consumer goes to the store to replenish his stock of deodorant, and looks at your can, he is sure to recollect the campaign and would be more inclined to buy this new product. How you retain that customer in the future depends on the quality of your product and also on your additional marketing campaigns. This brings us to the second situation in which marketing is involved.
Situation 2 is essentially for companies that have already been in the market for quite some time and want to promote a new product or want to retarget the audience with an existing product. In such a situation, the company already has the brand recall that it needs. However, the ad helps trigger not only brand recall even more, but also helps in promoting the new product. This is reason you would probably see the “Parryware” ad during a cricket match and wonder “Why the hell are they showing me the ad of a company I already know about and that too in the middle of a cricket match?[/b]” What the ad did was to just nudge your memory a bit (in case you knew about the company) or ingrained the company name in your subconscious. (In case you are an 8 yr old kid. Apparently kids can also influence the purchasing decisions of their parents)
However with traditional media there is an inherent disadvantage. I think you might have already thought about it by this time. Targeting the right set of consumers(Even though traditional media marketing is primarily intended to improve the brand awareness in addition to promoting the product itself, these forms of advertising are slowly losing sheen because of the inability to target specific consumers).
This is where digital media/online media comes into the picture. Over the last decade there has been tremendous improvement in internet technologies and business has been the main driver for this growth and improvement.
The story of online/internet shops has been like a domino effect. It started out with pizza delivery in the US where customers could order Pizzas online and gradually every other service/product that we can think about can be bought online (well almost!!). Everything changed with the entry of Google Search. Google’s revolutionary search engine was a game changer. Not only did it help the browsers to find what they were looking for in the internet, it changed the way marketing was done on the internet. Ok, let’s back up a little. So after some companies (more like individuals ) came up with their virtual world internet shops(others started to create their own websites and link to some other websites), they came up with the idea of marketing through their online shops(and websites). They started to offer space on their website/online shop pages for a fee to other website owners to put up a link that went to their websites. That was how online advertising saw the light of day. It worked well for the quite some time, until browsers stopped using these links to navigate to the websites.
Why?[/b]
Same problem – The marketing ads didn’t correspond to something the users wanted.
Unlike TV where viewers keep watching the ads (because they are so engrossed in the movie, the cricket match, the football match, or the MTV roadies), in case of internet, browsers could just ignore the ads that dwelled on the sides and corners of the website. Marketers tried to make the ads more interesting and engaging with new technologies and graphics, but that didn’t help much. That was the time when Google saved the day with the concept of contextual marketing advertisement and soon others followed suit. The technology itself was there, but Google provided a platform (Double Click) to it and brought an umbrella of online shops/websites/blogs into its advertising platform.
This has ushered in the era of more meaningful ads on the internet. You get ads for what you are looking for, many times without you even realizing it. Imagine this[/b]:
You are looking for cheap air tickets to your home town and you provide the price range for tickets in a ticket booking website, which is affiliated to the Google’s ad network agency. You don’t end up getting a good deal and decide to look later/book railway tickets. All this contextual information (your ticket budget, the fact that you didn’t end up purchasing a ticket at the current prices, and most importantly the browser id that you used to visit the website) are now in the network. Don’t worry though because no one can identify you as mr.x or ms.y with this information. After all it’s a browser id we are talking about. Continuing with the hypothetical situation, let’s say you browse a sports website or an entertainment website (which are also part of the Google ads network) in your free time and now the travel portal that you had visited has some discounts going on for the air route you were looking for. BAM!!!
You get an advertisement that offers you that discount. You click though that ad and end up purchasing an online ticket. The travel portal sold a ticket and didn’t need to pay for an expensive commercial featuring a superstar. That’s the magic of contextual advertising. On the internet, marketing is not limited to contextual ads. If you are a global brand promoting different products in different geographical locations, you can reach out to the different consumers with different products using geo – targeted ads. If you want to attract the consumers who visited your online shop and never came back, you can retarget them with attractive offers. YES! You can do that too. Added to all this, the biggest advantage of the internet marketing platform is the accurate tracking that you get.
What does that mean?[/b]
Well ideally when you invest say Rs. 650 million on a TV marketing campaign, you generally guess that the improvement in sales might have been because of the campaign. There is no accurate way of finding out how many consumers actually watched that advertisement. All you can do is make an educated guess based on the TRP of the shows during which the ad was displayed. Makes it really hard to get your ROI figures doesn’t it.
On the other hand, with online marketing, you get near about accurate figures of the amount of traffic that is coming to your website from the various online marketing channels (read web analytics tools like Adobe Omniture Site Catalyst, Google Analytics, Web Trends, etc.), how many of them ended up purchasing, and how many of them looked at the ads.
How is that going to help?[/b]
The million dollar question. Well most importantly it will help you decide where not[/b] to put your hard earned marketing dollars. You can quickly revise your marketing spend and look at the results and continue to optimize the process.
With social media now spreading the word for most companies that satisfy their customers, marketing has become a totally different ball game. Now we have new rich media websites and ads that allow the browsers to interact with them and thus improve the audience engagement unlike television ads where the customer has to just stare at the ads.
What’s next?[/b]
With Google TV round the corner, we can all soon expect to see a totally different picture in the marketing space. No more waiting for the shows in between those gruesome commercial breaks. Ignore them all, and look at ads that pop up and interest you. With so many new genre of devices (read ipads, kindle, iphones and the smart phones) and new technologies (3G, 4G on the way, augmented reality), we would soon witness new marketing techniques and media.
Case Study:[/b]
Viral Marketing works really well in the online world, where the “word of mouth” across social media websites and networking using friends can used to improve the brand awareness of a company.
Samsung recently initiated an online marketing campaign for the promotion of their Note PCs (read Galaxy Tab). The campaign aimed at improving brand interactions by making the users participate in an online contest and making the users refer the contest to their friends. Mass Portals like MSN , Yahoo and Rediff were used in the online promotion using banner advertisement. The participants in the contest had to answer simple questions in order to win a Samsung Note PC. It was a grand success with over 50,000 participants taking part in the contest.
Source: http://www.quasar.co.in/pdfs/samsungcasestudy.pdf