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Recently Lee Odden of Online Marketing Blog conducted a survey on “How Online Marketing Blog readers use twitter?” The survey has 220 respondents which is a decent number and results are also pretty much in line with the expectations.

To read more about the survey and result, please visit Top 10 Uses of twitter and Tools.

One of the uses which Lee mentions in the last part of the post is “Customer Support and Customer Outreach“.

I would go a step ahead than Customer Support and Customer Outreach and would talk about Engaging customers with Twitter. Customer support is a product’s view of marketing where customers are seen as a burden and hence the word “support”.

Today businesses talk about customer centric marketing and believe in relationships. For maintaining relationships, it is important to engage customers rather than supporting them. But how does one engage customers?

Customers get engaged when they have an ecosystem where they have the freedom to not only provide feedback, express their concerns and complaints but also partner in designing better value proposition for them i.e. better products and services for themselves. The engaging ecosystem also provides a platform for businesses to offer their services in a fun manner which in this case is 140 words tweets. J And above all, it comes free.

To provide an example of engaging customers through twitter, assume an online internet based marketing club which offers its services to small and medium enterprises. Now being a small company itself, it can’t afford to invest much on marketing collaterals or feedback channels. Also since the industry is so dynamic, it becomes imperative for the company to partner the customers in designing value proposition rather them delivering them a product.

Keeping all these things in mind, what should the company do? How should it make sure that it engages its customers in the true sense?

It uses twitter as a platform for feedback where customers can complain, if they have any and then they are taken good care of (and not Support). The company also uses twitter to provide consulting to its customers as telephone sessions across the globe would cost much more. Community is built around twitter for people to interact, communicate and share. Above all, it provides a medium to the company to make their customers, partner in designing better value proposition in future. Customers could be reached directly and requested to provide invaluable insights on products before the actual launch.

Conclusion

Uses like customer support are product’s view of marketing and not good for any business. Today for businesses to thrive, it has become imperative for companies to talk about engaging customers rather than satisfying them or just meeting their needs. And Twitter provides a perfect platform to companies to do just that Engage Customers.

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I read somewhere in a Philip Kotler’s marketing book that the smallest and the simplest definition of marketing is “meeting needs profitably”. Therefore the process starts from identification of needs, designing a product or service which contains requisite features and then the exchange of the same. The exchange will leave all the parties involved in the transaction better off i.e. a win-win game and not win-lose game.

For both (assuming there are only 2 parties involved, although there could be more than 2 as well) the parties to gain from the transaction, it is important or rather essential that both see some value proposition in the exchange. Due to its extreme importance in the business, the concept of value proposition is taught in every B-School. Every marketer, every business man, every CEO swears by it. They always talk about adding value to their share holders and stake holders.

But does the concept hold any relevance at SME (Small and medium enterprises) level? Do they also understand so called Value Proposition?

Recently I met with one of my friends. He has skates manufacturing unit in Noida (a suburb of Delhi). He happened to mention that he would like to have web presence for his business. We readily offered our (my friend as well) services but he mentioned that the final decision had to be taken by his father, who was running the business. He also warned us that his father is a tough nut to crack as many SEO consultants have found out earlier. So we decided to meet his father to explain to him the benefits of internet marketing and internet at large.

After an hour discussion, we were able to convince his father about the benefits of internet marketing and got the final approval. My friend was ecstatic and surprised as to how did we pull it off!

The answer is simple.

“Value Proposition”

Yes, we tried to show him the value which he would derive out of internet marketing instead of talking about Meta tags, keywords, alternate tags etc. which previous SEO companies did. We understood a very elementary thing that at the end of day, it is the extra business which he is interested in and not “search engine visibility”. He does not see value in being top on Google or Yahoo but generating that extra revenue.

So after this whole experience, I can safely say that yes the concept of “value proposition” is universal, exists even at Small scale level and will never lose its importance

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Customer Segmentation is a common jargon in marketing. It is said that every company should first segment its customers, choose the target segment and then aim to satisfy their needs. With Internet gaining ground and becoming the ‘the’ way of doing business, it becomes imperative for companies and internet marketers to understand the consumer behavior. Prior to any marketing efforts on internet, one should know the answers to the following question.

Do I know know how to segment the customers on the basis of their internet usage pattern?

Or

Are “All users are equal for me” ?

If you don’t have this primary information, there are good chances that your efforts do not produce the desired results, no matter how effective they were for others or how hard you try.How should you go about this task ?The answer is being provided by a study conducted by Mckinsey and Media Metrix which identifies internet consumer segmentation for the first time on their usage patterns.According to the study, the different categories are:

1) Simplifiers “End-to-End” Convenience seeking people. They spend on an average 7 hours per month but have the longest tenure online(49% have been online for over 5 years). Therefore if an internet marketer wants to have sustained sales from this segment, they must provide end-to-end convenience such as ease of access, availability of information etc.

2) Surfers Logs in with a specific purpose in mind- buying gifts for example. According to the study, they constitute 8% of the active user population but account for 32% of the online time.To attract and keep Surfers, a site needs cutting-edge design and features, constant updates, a strong online brand, and an assortment of products and services.

3) Connectors As the name implies,they use the internet to connect with people through different means like email, chat etc. Although Connectors account for 36% of the active user population, 40% of them have been online less than two years, and just 42% have made purchases online (versus an average of 61%). Connectors may count on offline brands they trust to lead them to appealing content and hence Companies with strong offline presences will have the advantage in reaching these beginners.

4) Bargainers These people are driven by quest for deals. 52% of eBay visitors is constituted by this category. To extract sales from this segment, the site must not only appeal to them on rational level but also on emotional level, satisfying their need for competitive pricing, the excitement of the “search,” and the desire for community.

5) Routiners They primarily go to internet for information. As the name implies these folks are routine visitors who are suckers for news. These people visit fewer domains but spend almost twice the time per page than others do. Routiners want superior content and the sense they are getting “something special.”

6) Sportsters Uses internet mainly for sports and entertainment related information. They spend on an average of 7.1 hours( versus 9.8 average). The challenge for companies is to turn this use into revenue, usually by moving visitors from “free” content to a paid subscription.As it is clear from the study that each consumer has different needs and usage pattern thereby giving rise to a different behavior. And therefore the knowledge of these behaviors provide an advantage to online marketers to target their customers in a much better optimized manner.

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Ask a layman, “Who do you think are websites made for?” and I am sure the prompt reply would be, “of course humans”. Ask a web developer or a webmaster, who does he think of while developing a website, and I am sure the reply would be “Search engines and humans”.

Websites were always meant for humans. But as time progressed and the number of pages on the internet started growing exponentially, it became difficult to locate them. There entered the Search engines and something happened that changed the way people used internet: Google.

Fast forward to the present scenario. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) became more of a norm than an option. Any serious webmaster or business owner will make sure to put as much efforts as possible to please the Google algorithm to hog the maximum attention by getting in the first page of search results. I do not mean to belittle SEO efforts in any manner whatsoever. It has remained and will continue to be an important tool to get your website closer to netizens.

But somewhere down the line the real target audience (humans) of the web took a backseat and it was the search engines for which majority of efforts were directed to, sometimes at the cost of content. Therefore I always like to call SEO as online marketing for search engines.

But then web evolved further and we had social networking sites and social book marking sites. Social networks are a rage, anybody would testify to this fact. Millions of users around the world visit orkut, facebook, myspace. Just imagine the kind of ready audience available at these platforms. I strongly feel in near future marketing on social forums would be a prime method of marketing and not just an option. Webmasters and business owners should concentrate on putting quality content on their websites, which is appealing to the audience and warrants attention and repeat visits. And then having done that, put efforts to devise sustained market campaigns on these forums with equal vigor as they do in their offline marketing campaigns currently. And this especially will benefit to service providers who are ready for customers from a global marketplace.

And who knows if search engines start indexing and searching social network pages in near future, the marketing possibilities on these networks will rise exponentially.

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Confused!!! 

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.

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