Online Marketing

The five major areas of marketing are Service management, Sales management, Advertising, Product development and Pricing. Majority of the companies are using online tools for marketing, in at least four of the five major areas of marketing. Companies see online tools as an important and effective component of their marketing strategies.

What are these online tools?

We are all familiar with e-mail, information-rich web sites and display advertising. Apart from these lot of interactive and collaborative technologies are being developed these days which are collectively known as Web 2.0. The following is are the latest online tools used by companies for advertising, product development and customer service.

Blogs Short form for web logs, these are online journals or diaries hosted on a website. There are many different types of blogs like personal blogs, corporate blogs, community blogs etc.

Online games include both games played on dedicated game consoles that can be networked and “massively multiplayer” games, which involve thousands of people who interact simultaneously through personal avatars in online worlds that exist independently of any single player’s activity.

Podcasts are audio or video recordings—a multimedia form of a blog or other content. They are often distributed through aggregators, such as iTunes.

Social networks allow members of specific sites to learn about other members’ skills, talents, knowledge, or preferences. Commercial examples include Orkut, Facebook and MySpace. Some companies use such systems internally to help identify experts.

Virtual worlds, such as Second Life, are highly social, three-dimensional online environments shaped by users who interact with and receive instant feedback from other users through the use of avatars.

Web services are software systems that make it easier for different systems to communicate with each other automatically to pass information or conduct transactions. A retailer and supplier, for example, might use Web services to communicate over the public Internet and automatically update each other’s inventory systems.

Widgets are programs that allow access from users’ desktops to Web-based content.

Wikis, such as Wikipedia, are systems for collaborative publishing. They allow many authors to contribute to an online document or discussion.

There is a significant change in consumer behavior due to the evolution of digital marketing. More people use web to search information and they often become aware of new products.

The important fact is that, web will play a role only in the first two stages of consumer decision-making process – product awareness and information gathering.

Courtesy: Mckinsey Quarterly