e-Business, e-Commerce, Online Marketing & Web Strategy

Creating the e-Business - Part 4: Marketing Strategy

Effectively Marketing Online

Website Analytics - The Customer-Centric Organization

Creating the e-Business - Part 4: Marketing Strategy

Effectively Marketing Online

Website Analytics - The Customer-Centric Organization

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Oct. 31st, 2008 at 10:28 AM

Marketing Strategy

ABC believes it can accomplish these strategic goals by advertising in horizontally integrated e-marketplaces and by optimizing its website for content and backward linkage to increase its web page ranking and popularity with the major search engines. ABC must answer which marketplaces will drive its target market to its website. Business-to-Business marketplaces like ThomasNet, Global Spec, Vert-Markets and similar horizontally integrated e-marketplaces could offer relevant lead generation for ABC. ABC must also answer the question of which advertising methods would offer the best brand awareness opportunities for the company.

ABC could look towards various brokerage models when determining the appropriate marketing mix. Brokerage models are used to bring buyers and sellers together in an effort to establish business connections between them in order to form a mutually agreeable transaction. One example of a brokerage model is a search agent. Search agents attempt to take the user’s query, or criteria, for a specific good or service and find the best provider or best price for the user. Examples of brokerage models are, as mentioned above, e-marketplaces. E-marketplaces have many companies that advertise on their sites. When the user enters their criteria, the system selects the best company to fulfill the needs of the user.

Another example of a brokerage model is the auction broker. Auction brokers do not get involved in the transaction, they simply take a percentage of the sales commission or require a small listing fee to list products or services on it site. An example of an auction broker would be E-bay. E-bay has a section of its website dedicated to the small business. ABC could look here in an attempt to procure auction brokerage business while getting rid of excess inventory.

A further example of a brokerage model business is the distributor. Distributor sites serve as an online catalog and lead generating tool for their advertisers. An example of a B2B online distributor would be ThomasNet’s online catalog of industrial manufacturers and distributors. ABC must also question how it wants to create brand awareness throughout the industry.

In the next post, we will discuss branding and positioning for our fictional company.

Copyright | emarketingprofs | All Rights Reserved

Aug. 26th, 2008 at 4:25 PM

Effectively Marketing Online

The purpose of marketing is to educate the public on how you can solve their problems, while reducing their risk of doing business with you. The most effective marketing you can do is to find out what your customers’ major pain-points are, and let them know how you can help. This comes with time and research, but the end result will help to legitimize your business by talking their language and offering them solutions. This process is called “bridging the confidence gap”. Now, we can see how offering a solution to your customers’ pain points can help get you the business once your company is discovered, but the discovery phase can be tricky. This is where carefully analyzing your Web tracking results can help.

If you see a trend wherein a lot of your Web visitors are coming from a certain Website, you can find out what that site is about and really start to analyze their content, their business purpose and their advertising techniques. This also works with your competitors’ Websites as well. You can look at their source code by clicking ‘view’ then ‘source’ in your Internet Explorer toolbar to see what keywords and metatags they are using. You can look at their backwards links and search for them on your favorite search engine. This will give you an idea of how they market themselves and who is linking to them. There is a strong possibility that sites linking to your competition will also link to you. But remember, keyword density is also very important.

Make sure you fill up several pages with the wordage you think your customers will be searching on. Use wordage from your customers marketing material, from your competitors marketing material and from your Web analytics. There is no shame in reusing other people’s data to your advantage. Just be sure to come up with fresh ideas and a fresh layout. And as long as you are optimizing your site better than the next guy, you will be the one on top of the search engine rankings and you will be the one with the first shot at gaining the opportunity to impress the customer. Just make sure that you capitalize on that opportunity by offering them low risk ways to move along the buying spectrum. Remember, the big sale is nice, but sometimes the little sale has to happen first, then the marketing hopper can be put into action to slowly change those small customers into your perfect customers by cross-marketing, up-selling and instituting value-added services along the way.

Aug. 26th, 2008 at 1:50 PM

Customer-Centric Organization

Most businesses think they are customer-centric, but most of them are not. What does it mean to be customer-centric? How can Marketing managers and Web managers help in the creation of a more customer-centric organization? These are vital questions that must be answered in order to gain market share in the new economy. So the first question is: What does the customer want? Sounds reasonable doesn’t it? It turns out that customers tend to only want one thing; they want you to help them solve a problem. Now, I think most marketers understand this, but most marketers still end up touting, or over-touting their capabilities and products.

They do this in an attempt to make the customer feel comfortable in conducting business with them. And where it is necessary to help the customer bridge their confidence gap, hyping your own company is not the best way to do this. This sort of marketing or selling approach is more effective later on in the buying cycle, once the customer has pretty much chosen you as their preferred buying source. Right now, we are talking about the initial stages of the buying process, the stages in which the customer is fact finding and problem solving. They don’t know what product or service they want to buy. So they don’t need you telling them how great your company is. So, for now, let’s focus on the customer.

Let’s say that you are John Smith, a plumbing supplies distributor, and you get a call from one of your customers saying that they are having trouble with one of the copper fittings you are selling them. He says that the pipe needs to support the very high water pressure that is created when they add garnet to the water spray. So some sort of heavy duty pipe is needed. So, you go online and type into your favorite search engine the phrase ‘heavy duty copper pipe for garnet water spray’. First, let me point out that this type of query is not unusual. The typical person sourcing a product or service online types in between 4-10 keywords in their query string. Why is this important to you?

It’s important because as a Web manager for a company that produces copper pipes, you don’t want to be spinning your wheels trying to get to the top of the search engines with the keyphrase ‘copper pipes’. Where that would be nice to have that top position for ‘copper pipes’, the reality of the situation is that the competition is probably too fierce for that phrase to gain the top spot. Also, your customers are not typing that phrase. They are typing in ‘heavy duty copper pipe for garnet water spray’. And not only is it easier to get to the top of the search engines with this phrase, anyone typing that phrase in and clicking on your link are going to be a much more qualifies lead.

You see, it’s all about content. You can have the words ‘copper pipes’ plastered all over your site, but if you don’t have ‘heavy duty copper pipe for garnet water spray’ anywhere on your site, you probably won’t be seen. But let’s say that you have a product that is especially designed for high pressure garnet water spraying. It is a copper pipe fitted with a barrier ring. It still would not have done you a whole lot of good just to promote the term ‘copper pipe with barrier ring’, because the customer doesn’t know they need a barrier ring. The barrier ring is the solution, not the problem. You have to market to the problem. So, how do you know what John Smith is going to type in? There are many ways to find out.

One way is to look at your Website tracking results and physically look at the keywords and search phrases that visitors are typing in. Another way is to conduct surveys or conduct research expeditions towards your customer’s customers. In other words, find out everything you can about John Smith’s customers, specifically focusing on their ‘hot buttons’, which are the biggest frustration points, biggest problems and most common application issues that they face. If you had known that XYZ Co. was manufacturing pressure sprayers that stripped paint and rust from hard metals, and if you had known that they were having trouble with their machines breaking because their copper fittings were breaking with the new combination of garnet and water, and if you would have known that XYZ Co. was looking for a reinforced copper pipe, then you would have gone in and sold them your product, right? Well, the Internet works the same way except that you can now sell to hundreds or thousands of XYZ Co.’s just by having the right content on your page.

And to make the story even better, the XYZ Co.’s are beginning to skip calling John Smith and going right to their computer to solve their problems. Now, with the research you have done within your own Web analytics, and with your surveys and research complete, you have discovered XYZ Co.’s hot buttons and you have optimized your site for those hot buttons. Now XYZ Co. can find you, and because you spoke intelligently about their problem and offered a good solution, you have bridged the confidence gap successfully. They are now ready to hear about your company; then and only then can the up-selling and cross-selling begin.

So, if you are the pipe manufacturer, or if you are John Smith distributor, the best thing you can do is get to know your customer or your customer's customer and find out what is important to them. This is being customer-centric and this is how the Web managers are changing marketing for the better. But remember, it all starts with Website analytics.

September 2009