4 Steps to Repeat Business

 If you have been around Internet marketing for any length of time, you’ll agree that successful internet marketers are always talking about building a list. And in a real sense, it’s true that you cannot really claim to have an Internet business if you don’t have a group of individuals who have signed up to receive your emails and are eagerly poised to follow your advice and buy the products you recommend. Internet marketing is very personal, not distant or automated. Until you begin to build the relationship with each of your readers, as if you
were talking to each person one by one, you may be misleading yourself regarding your own longterm chances of success online.

STEP 1 : THE RESEARCH AND OFFER

Increased Markets

   Traditional marketing can be expensive. One full-page print ad can cost anywhere between a few thousand dollars to a few hundred thousand dollars, depending on the publication. Television spots can be even more expensive. Thirty seconds of time can cost between a few hundred dollars to air in a single county on a relatively unpopular cable show, to nearly three million dollars to air during the Super Bowl. This can add up quickly, limiting reach and exposure.

   Technically, the Web’s exposure is limitless and easily accessible to anyone, regardless of demographic or geographic boundaries.

Individual Message Delivery

Traditional mass marketing tools and branding efforts address the audience as a single entity, regardless of how many people that might include. This approach offers no flexibility in speaking to individual members of a target market. It sends messages to large demographics based largely on assumptions made from the shows being watched. The investment firm Charles Schwab can take a calculated risk that they are more likely to reach people interested in their services by running their ads during The Suze Orman Show on CNBC than they would by advertising on The Real World on MTV.

The Web’s Hybrid Status

Advertising is used to promote a product or service, or increase awareness of a brand. It’s a single-effect communication requiring the audience to take action themselves. A reader of a print ad, for example, cannot make a purchase from that print ads. He or she must take some sort of action, such as making a phone call or visiting a store in order to make a purchase. The ad promotes the brand, and the company or the store sells the product. The Web, however, falls between the promotion and sales processes.

The Web’s Place in Brand Building

Later in this book we will analyze how marketers communicate their messages through a variety of vehicles including television, radio, print advertising, direct mail, and roadside billboards. Each has pros and cons, including price, reach, and an ability or inability to be targeted to a specific audience. Marketers set their strategies by mixing and matching the marketing vehicles that they expect will be the most effective in communicating their brand to the desired audience for the budget they have available.

Elements of the Brand

    Brands are complex entities that are made up of both tangible and intangible ingredients, all of which play an important role in speaking to the consumer, communicating a message, and building an audience. Brand managers are responsible for building trust, communicating a message, and forging an emotional connection with their market. All of that takes the careful fostering of promise, personality, unique qualities, and representative icons and elements.

The Importance of Branding

   Brand building is such an important element to success that most large companies hire people with the title of Brand Manager, as well as look to outside agencies for help building brands. Successful brand building involves paying constant attention to user enjoyment of a given product or service, setting sufficient budgets for marketing, and evolving the brand over time as markets and opinions change.

Companies invest in building and marketing their brands for a number of reasons, including:

• Increasing recognition

• Establishing trust

• Building brand loyalty

           

Breaking Down the Brand

   Understanding the brand is vital to the success of any marketing campaign, whether online or offline. In fact, the brand is the foundation upon which marketing programs are developed. What exactly is a brand? The answer often depends on who you ask and the context in which you are asking. The best way to arrive at a comprehensive definition, for marketing purposes, is to break the word down, starting from the beginning.

       Visit any cattle farm and you are likely to see cows with letters or icons burnt into their hides with a branding iron. These burn marks help farmers determine which cows belong to which farm, should herds become intermingled while grazing.

Video as a Social Media Tool

   Online video has become an important part of the social media revolution, infi ltrating sites in practically every category and expanding into its own industry. One reason for the popularity of video-sharing sites is that most provide free storage space, so that producers do not need to pay to upload their content. Th e cost of servers and the potential complexities of developing a site capable of showing videos could be an insurmountable barrier for the average user. Video sharing sites virtually eliminate the costs and hassles for producers and create a central place where viewers can come to watch a variety of videos.

Web Based Video

   Video is one of the fastest growing mediums on the Web. It has captured the attention of millions of viewers who tune in to watch everything from their favorite shows, newscasts, and music videos to movie trailers, home videos, and a wide range of amateur productions. Marketers have jumped on the bandwagon, getting involved in the online video market to help promote their brands to a growing audience that is hungry for new video content.

An Overview of Social Media and Social Networking Sites

Social media is the umbrella term for the wide variety of tools and applications that give the Web its social capabilities—capabilities that allow a community to come together, communicate, and build upon each other’s opinions and ideas. Social media applications and tools are numerous and include:

Entertainment

Entertainment-specific sites have grown in popularity—a simple glance at the most-visited sites on the Web proves that. Users continue to flock to YouTube, while new and established sites race to cash in on the streaming-video craze. Traditional forms of entertainment such as TV and board games have steadily lost their audience, while online video and gaming sites have seen steady and impressive increases. Flash, a program developed by Adobe, has played a large role in the popularity of both online gaming and video sharing,

Informational

Much like any other site category, the purpose of an informational site is to relate content to the users. Th e diff erence, however, is that informational sites do so as the primary reason for being, unlike a B2B site, which exists in order to generate new contacts and eventually increase sales, or B2C sites, which primarily exist to generate Web-based sales.

Social Networking

Social networking is the interaction of people from a variety of demographic groups and geographic locations via the Internet. At its heart, through blogging, Web site feedback, reviews, message boards, RSS, and other tools, the Internet has become one large, ongoing conversation, with side topics being started and continued all the time. Th ink of it as a large party. Th e party itself is made up of a large group of people in attendance, all talking and engaging in conversation, meeting each other, exchanging ideas, debating, and soon. Th roughout the night, small groups of people band together to engage in a variety of side conversations, usually open to anyone who passes by.

B2E (Business to Employee)

B2E (business to employee) marketing involves a business carrying out online initiatives to communicate with its employees. Many medium to large companies have B2E sites, which help facilitate internal communications and provide information to employees. B2E sites can be used to provide a variety of resources and important information to employees, including:
• Important corporate announcements
• Access to employee information, such as benefi ts statement, 401(k) management, insurance information, etc.

C2C (Consumer to Consumer)

Drive through a typical suburban neighborhood on a sunny weekend day and you are bound to pass a garage sale or two, where homeowners have put used items that they no longer want in their yard and driveway so that other people can purchase them. Th e people running the garage sale aren’t doing so as a profi t-generating business. They are not turning their yard into a retail center in order to sell new products that they have bought at wholesale and marked up for profit. They are consumers who have bought products and are now selling them to other consumers.

B2C (Business to Consumer)

E-commerce, which is the nickname for “electronic commerce,” is the buying and selling of goods and services over electronic systems, most notably via the Web. While bank transfers of electronic funds and other types of exchanges technically fall under the e-commerce umbrella, e-commerce is commonly used to refer to purchases made via a Web site, and this is how the term will be used throughout this book.

While some B2B sites do have e-commerce capabilities on their site (companies that sell ink and print toner to other companies, for example, might utilize

B2B (Business to Business)

One of the most common types of Web sites is a B2B (business to business) site. B2B involves one business marketing and selling products and services to other businesses. Many businesses generate their revenue solely by serving other businesses. Advertising agencies, for example, are not interested in reaching out to individual consumers. To make their money, they need to catch the attention of business owners and marketing directors. Payroll administration companies, insurance providers, trucking companies, IT management firms,

Web Portals

A Web portal is a site that helps users locate information that is dispersed throughout the Web; a portal presents and organizes information regarding other sites. Typically, this is done through a search engine, which is a program that allows users to find documents based on keywords that they enter into a text field. Th e portal will scour the Web for pages that include the desired keywords and, almost instantaneously, present a list of relevant pages. Most portals do not divulge the specific weighting system used for compiling their search results or how sites are ranked. However, the indices are usually created using a variety of criteria, including information contained

Types of Web Sites

Different types of sites serve different purposes; each provides a unique opportunity to marketers. The type of Web site you build depends on the purpose of the site, the market you want to reach, and whether the site will be used to support an existing business or function as a business unto itself. In the following sections, we will cover the primary types of site that currently exist on the Web.

1. Web Portals
2. B2B (Business to Business)
3. B2C (Business to Consumer)
4. C2C (Consumer to Consumer)