10 Reasons Marketing Strategy Should Include the Internet
September 21, 2007
by Paul Christ
It may seem surprising but many companies, big and small, have yet to develop a rational Internet marketing strategy. Considering the Internet has now been used effectively by marketers since 1994, any organization without a strategy to utilize the Internet for marketing is probably making a big mistake.
For any organization that still does not have a meaningful Internet marketing effort we offer 10 Reasons why you should.
1. The Go-To Place for Information
Possibly the most important reason why companies need to have an active Internet marketing strategy is because of the transformation that has occurred in how customers seek information. Yes customers still visit stores, talk to sales representatives, look through magazines and talk to friends to gather product information. But today’s companies must also understand that customers are turning in mass to the Internet as their primary knowledge source. In particular, search engines, blogs, social networks and forums are increasingly influential and should not be taken lightly. Marketers must recognize that the Internet is where customers are heading and, if marketers want to stay visible and viable, they must follow.
2. What Customers Expect
The Internet is not only becoming the resource of choice for finding information, in the next few years it is also likely to be the expected location where customers can learn about products and make purchases. This is especially the case for customers below the age of 30. In many countries, nearly all children and young adults have been raised knowing how to use the Internet. Once members of this group dominate home and business purchases they will clearly expect companies to have a strong Internet presence.
3. Captures a Wide Range of Customer Information
As a data collection tool the Internet is unmatched when it comes to providing information on customer activity. Each time a visitor accesses a website they leave an information trail that includes how they got to the site, how they navigated through the site, what they clicked on, what was purchased and loads of other information. When combined with methods for customer identification, such as login information or tracking “cookies”, the marketer has the ability to monitor customers’ activity over repeated visits to the site. Knowing customers’ behavior and preferences opens up tremendous opportunities to cater to their needs and, if done correctly, customers will respond with a long-lasting loyalty.
4. Extreme Target Marketing
The most efficient way for marketers to spend money is to direct spending to those who are most likely to be interested in what the marketer is offering. Unfortunately, efforts to target only customers who have the highest probability of buying have not been easy. For instance, consider how much money is wasted on mass promotion, such as television advertisements, where a large portion of the audience may actually not be part of the marketer’s target market. Yet the Internet’s unrivaled ability to identify and track customers has greatly improved marketer’s ability to target customers who exhibit the highest potential for purchasing products. Marketing’s long sought goal of targeting to individual customers rather than mass marketing to many is attainable reality on the Internet.
5. Stimulate Impulse Purchases
Whether customers like it or not, the Internet is proving to be the ultimate venue for inducing impulse purchases. Much of this can be attributed to marketers taking advantage of improvements in technologies that: 1) allow a website to offer product suggestions based on customer’s online buying behavior, and 2) streamline the online purchasing process. But online impulse purchasing also takes advantage of the “purchase now, pay later” attitude common in an overspending credit card society. How this plays out over time as many customers become overwhelmed with debt will need to be watched and could impact online marketer’s activities.
6. Customized Product and Service Offerings
Companies know they can develop loyal customers when product and service offerings are designed to satisfy individual needs. This has led many online marketers to implement a mass customization strategy offering customers online options for configuring products or services. The interactive nature of the Internet makes “build-your-own” a relatively easy to implement purchasing option. An empowered customer base that feels a company will deliver exactly what they want is primed to remain loyal for long period of time.
7. Takes Prospects Right to the Sale
No other form of communication comes close to turning exposure to promotion into immediate customer action as the Internet, which allows customers to make purchases immediately after experiencing a promotion. Prior to the Internet, the most productive call-to-action was through television informercials that encourage viewers to call toll-free phone numbers. However, moving customers from a non-active state (i.e., watching television) to an active state (i.e., picking up the phone to call the number) is not nearly as effective as getting people to click on an Internet ad while they are actively using the Internet.
8. Conveys Perception of Being a Full-Service Provider
For distributors and retailers the Internet makes it easy to be a comprehensive supplier. Unlike brick-and-mortar suppliers who are often judged by the inventory that is actually on hand or services provided at a store, e-commerce sites can give the illusion of having depth and breadth of inventory and service offerings. This can be accomplished by placing product and service information on the company’s website but behind the scenes having certain orders fulfilled by outside suppliers via shipping and service agreements. With such arrangements customers may feel they are dealing with providers that offer full-service when in reality a certain percentage of the products and services are obtained from other sources.
9. Lower Overhead, Lower Costs, Better Service
Internet technologies are replacing more expensive methods for delivering products and services, and for handling customer information needs. Cost savings can certainly be seen with products and services deliverable in digital form (e.g., music, publications, graphic design, etc.) where production and shipping expenses are essentially removed from the cost equation. Cost savings may also be seen in other marketing areas including customer service where the volume of customer phone calls may be reduced as companies provide online access to product information through such services as online chat and searchable knowledge bases (e.g., FAQs). Field salespeople may also see benefits by encouraging prospects to obtain product information online prior to a face-to-face meeting. This may help reduce the time devoted to explaining basic company and product information and leave more time for understanding and offering solutions to customers’ problems. As these examples suggest, the Internet may lower administrative and operational costs while offering greater value to customers.
10. Create Worldwide Presence
The Internet is a communication and distribution channel that offers global accessibility to a company’s products and services. Through a website a local marketer can quickly become a global marketer and, by doing so, expand their potential target market to many times its current size. Unlike the days before e-commerce when marketing internationally was a time-consuming and expensive undertaking, the uploading of files to establish a website is all that is needed to create a worldwide presence. While establishing a website does not guarantee international sales (there is a lot more marketing work needed for the website to be viable internationally), the Internet provides a gigantic leap into global business compared to pre-Internet days.