Internet marketing without web presence?
Posted by iMark | Under Internet Marketing - An Overview Tuesday Mar 11, 2008Confused!!!
Wondering if that’s possible? Yes, why not.
Let me rephrase the question for more clarification…
Can internet marketing be done for businesses which have very limited or no web presence?
Referring back to the first post ,internet marketing is nothing but marketing done over internet, which happens to be just another medium. Therefore if a company wants to market itself over internet, nothing should stop it from going ahead and doing it. If one can move beyond from thinking of Internet as a separate entity and consider it just as another medium like TV, Radio, Print media, everything will fall in place.
To give a very simple application of the concept, consider a jeweler in a market. It typically does its advertising through banners, hoardings, newspaper, pamphlets. All these media cost a lot to small enterprises. Coupled with real world marketing strategies, the store (jeweler) could also use emails to market its services. Email Marketing provides a cost efficient solution to small enterprises which comes at dirt cheap prices. And the best part is it can be done more than once at specific intervals without incurring substantial costs. Email marketing is a kind of direct marketing where each potential customer in the local market gets a customized email. The effectively written email will not only advertise the store but also entice people to visit them.
And this is not to be confused with spamming. What we are talking about here is not a blind bulk email sending process to thousands of recipient everyday. That only harms the image of the sender. What we are talking about is an email marketing campaign to a qualified, targeted mailing list, which in this case would be people interested to buy jewelry. Small criteria in this case would be to select email accounts of people in the age group of 24-30 and are single, as they are more likely to get married and hence may need jewelry. This is just a simple example. Power of having a well targeted email list can give you a great conversion rate of potential customers to actual buyers.
Although the above example is more relevant in urban setting, where most of the people have internet access, yet it underlines an important concept - Businesses can reap the benefits of internet marketing irrespective of the status or size of their web presence.
Been reading for a while now. Just wanted to say good job.
Chris Tackett
all said very well…good job.
But i am still confused how do local businesses segment their target markets before marketing. e-mail marketing can do it but if you market by putting up banners on various websites how do they ensure that they are pitching the right people or rather ‘at least’ the right people. With the kind of reach and range internet has, it is a difficult task to segment people visiting websites based on geography…
Hi Mr. Confused
Thanks for visiting the blog and expressing your concerns.
Yes you are right in pointing out that it would be difficult to target the potential customers in the local territory by putting up banners. And that’s why it is recommended that internet marketing should be seen as a part of the whole marketing ecosystem rather than a separate standalone one time activity.
but then as you earlier pointed out that small enterprises might use internet as the capital required in this medium is relatively very less…In that case can we still say that internet marketing will help small companies too…and even if they use it, I dont see any these campaigns making any impact….
Mr. Confused
Yes internet marketing would be of help to small companies too as pointed out in the post.
These campaigns would surely be effective in generating more revenues if executed effectively. And gradually with time, as the company moves towards having web presence then it can reap the full potential of the internet.
@ Confused.
One has to market at the right place. Segmentation will happen if you can know where is the possibility of your marketing efforts getting maximum visibility to the potential crowd. For instance the jwelery guy (the example in the post) can get a banner in a marriage portal. Imagine the kind of targeted visibility he wud get. And i am sure 1 banner on a good site will cost less than 10K pamphlets, print ads and hoardings and still be equally or in some case more effective.
@ Karan
I agree to what you are saying. My concerns were mainly regarding segmentation based on geography..
Taking your example forward, I assume that the main customers for the jewellery guy reside in the same city he has his shop in… Now what kind of visibility will he get by putting up a banner on a site visited by people around the world, what I mean to say his that though he will get visibility but the relevant population will be a very small portion. Moreover, if promotion is done focussing on the relevant geography, the impact might be more…
I agree what you are saying is absolutely true in context of businesses which have widespread presence and are able to leverage an ecosystem with their financial resources but in case of local businesses I doubt if it will be effective….
Yes confusd you are right (and not confused
that was an example, so i wud suggest that jweler to post ads on craiglist or an equivalent version in India, cheap and targeted only to a particular city.