Online Marketing
Lama Alnamlah
Al-imam University
23\12\2014
Marketing has undergone changes ranging from global presence, to the medium on which it is done over the years. However, no such transition has been as significant as that which we have seen in the past two decades with the birth and substantial growth of the internet. With internet penetration increasing and the user base crossing three billion, the internet is proving itself to be a vast and promising platform for advertisemen.
It has been already been recognized by major companies around the globe whose interest mounts towards highly focused and vastly complicated procedure for targeting their advertisement carefully and more efficiently. For example, Google has with Google AdSense has been utilizing the browsing data of their users to target advertising towards them. Using their likes, dislikes and interests, Google subjects them to the advertisements which they would be most likely to respond to. Such techniques and many more that are being utilized only skim the surface of the innovation possible for marketing that only the internet can offer.
A major advantage of online marketing is customer interactivity. Marketing on the web offers potential customers to respond immediately, whether it’s visiting the product website or even just clicking on the advertisement. Such interactivity alone gives an extremely tempting opportunity to business on the net, as it promises faster response times.
Internet Marketing can be divided into three specialized areas; web marketing, email market, and social media marketing. Each are targeting a specific user base and are more attuned to receiving responses of certain nature.
Better known as E-Commerce, web Marketing involves promotion on websites. Marketing on the web is a much more open ended approach, as it usually involves displaying the advertisement on the side of a web page, with only limited knowledge of what users will be visiting that page. Due to privacy concerns, making web marketing more specific for the user has been a growing challenge. However, since IP address is an open information when visiting a page, many web advertisers have resorted to using the location affiliated to the IP address as its context. Hence for example, a user with an IP address tied to the United States will be shown advertisements from the United States.
Another data E-Commerce is using is search trends. Search engine queries are also a public information, hence many online marketing companies have been using search trends to increase the chances of promoting their products. This is known as Search Engine Optimization or SEO. SEO is now being widely used as the primary technique for marketing online.
The second form of internet marketing is email marketing. Promoting via email is not as open as e-commerce, since your product is only going to be shown to a very specific user base, and will not be open for more incoming visitors. Furthermore, the only way email marketing can spread is only if the recipient decides to forward the email him or herself. This is a highly inefficient way of ensuring a successful and widespread marketing campaign. Email marketing does however have an advantage in the sense that its chances of being seen, or in other words receiving a ‘hit’, is much high than marketing on a web page. Users tend to ignore the side content displayed on a webpage, however on email, they will be more likely to see it. Unlike web marketing, companies that advertise through email are casting a much more focused net.
Marketing through the email also has the advantage that once seen by a potential customer, he or she may respond through their email address, allowing access to their personal preference. This gives the marketing agencies a lot more information as to what the user will most likely respond, and it virtually guarantees a much more successful and efficient promotion at any point. They may also keep their preference as future reference and build a growing database of what their customers like and dislike, increasing their understanding of the market trend.
Finally, the last form of internet marketing is social media marketing. It is common knowledge that there is no more powerful form of marketing than word of mouth. With the rise of social media, marketing on websites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have become a very realistic and potentially fruitful marketing approach. By marketing on the social media, users on social media, who are constantly connected to each other, will carry on an invisible marketing campaign that they themselves created. This has a strong potential of becoming viral and to spread on its own. Furthermore, on the social media, users are voluntarily sharing their personal profiles which gives companies unprecedented access to tune their advertisements to the likeness of each user on the social media. Unlike web marketing, where preferences are unknown, and email where they are known only if given, social media hosts are vast library of user trends that can be exploited.
Social media marketing has been proven to be extremely powerful, much more so than any other forms of internet marketing. However, in the recent years, it has undergone controversy. Users are now becoming more concerned over what information is being seen and how much of their privacy is actually present as opposed to being promised. Rising concerns over internet privacy is now just among social media marketing, but also all other forms of internet promotion. With questions over their privacy, users are now become more and more reluctant to share their information freely and it’s becoming a much more case of business ethics.
Whatever may be the case, online marketing is proving to be an extremely promising and form of promotion that is being innovated day by day. Its vastly untapped resource of information is the basis of a strong prospective platform for advertising. By considering the rising number of internet users, coupled with growth of mobile and web technology, it is only safe to presume that online marketing a safe venture for the future and boasts innovations that may even be yet to seen.
:References
Ashley Friedlein, (2014). Digital Marketing and Ecommerce Trends and Predictions for 2014. New York: E-consultancy.
Scott M. Smith, Gerald S. Albaum, (n.d.). An Introduction to Marketing Research. University of New Mexico.
Webopedia.com, (2014). What is Internet Marketing? Webopedia. Retrieved 22 December 2014, from http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/I/internet_marketing.html
