Online marketing strategies and applications

Online Promotion

I believe that online marketing is an effective tool in 2014. There are several reasons for this. The first is that as a marketer you have to go where the eyeballs are. Exposure is important, and people today spent hours every day on their computers, tablets and smartphones. There are ample advertising and promotion opportunities with these media, so there no excuse for having a presence online. The reach is incredible, too much to pass up.

The second reason is that online marketing is data-driven. This means that it is easier to hit target markets than older forms of media. Even niche products can gain exposure to their target market. Remember that all advertising has a target market, but you pay for a certain level of exposure. This means that there is always some spillover, where your advertising is reaching an audience that is not part of the target audience. With online marketing, you get close to your target, which means that your marketing dollars are more efficient. Online marketing does this through the use of massive data sets, even greater than what you see with other media forms. This efficiency is important for marketers working on a budget.

Another benefit of online marketing is that social media market is a different form of marketing from the typical model where advertising is a one-way communication from company to market. Social media represents a two-way dialogue with customers. This allows for different types of marketing to take place, which can be powerful. In additional social media is a form of marketing where the company controls the costs, and the costs are generally low. Even with online advertising, the company is basically a price taker with limited bargaining power, but social media is generated by the company and consumers volunteer to receive communications from the company.

There are a number of online channels available for marketing, but whether any deliver competitive advantage is a matter of what industry the company is in. Competitive advantage only exists when a company does something, or does it better, than the competition. Online marketing is not exactly a new story, so most firms already engage in it. However, not all firms engage in it equally well. In a vacuum, not knowing what the industry or the competition is, a company simply needs to focus on being as good at online marketing as possible. Advertising is not that place. The reason is simple -- the gatekeeper for online marketing is Google, and Google has the bargaining power because they have the data and the technology to reach the market. That means that your competitor is also dealing with Google. They have access to the same data, and Google tends to charge just a shade below marginal benefit. What you pay Google is going to be profitable for you, but only a little bit, because you're a price-taker. So while you have to be in the game, this is not where you find competitive advantage.