Digitalwall: Stop Internet Marketing (1) All Market; No Marketing

A marketing that hails advertising but turns a blind eye to building of distribution channels is one-legged. It simply doesn’t get very far.

Just the other day, a friend of mine forwarded me a letter, which told of a seminar on Internet marketing. The lineup of the lecturers seemed quite impressive, with many of them having been long known as experts on Internet marketing. Some names were familiar and I could tell that the initial involvement of some in Internet Marketing could go back five or six good years.

The curriculum outline, however, told of a different story, as it sadly struck me that the discussion of Internet marketing as a supposedly very important subject has managed to come up with very little new stuff in a span of five to six years. That is, people remain hung up on such matters as how to set up websites, how many different types of Internet advertising there are, how to buy ads more effectively, how to compile a list of potential customers through promotional activities, how to induce forwards, and how to keep track of newsletter subscription and penetration.

Granted, these bits of practical information can prove essential to those who want to plunge into Internet marketing right away since they would want to know how well their newsletter ads would work out and whether it is a good idea to play some interactive game with Internet surfers to collect some names.

Despite these considerations, the reality remains that these courses on Internet marketing only deal with the issues of contacting target clients on the Internet, communicating with them and keeping track of them. Interestingly, these issues are not unique to Internet marketing. That is, one gets to ponder on all these questions when he buys a TV ad slot, since the TV ad agent, too, will let you in on the effectiveness of the TV ad through market research.

What, then, is Internet marketing? Stripped down, Internet marketing is just marketing. Having "Internet" installed in front as a modifier doesn't really say anything except that this particular type of marketing takes place on the Internet. It means as much, or rather, as little as "TV marketing" or "newspaper marketing," if there were really such terms.

We must then revisit the core of marketing. That is, marketing can be broken down into combinations of STP and 4Ps. STP, to begin with, are the initials of Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning, while the four Ps stand for products, prices, places (outlets, distribution channels), and promotions.

Let me be very clear about one thing. By giving you these jargon terms, I am not showing off my knowledge of marketing 101, since these bits of information are to be found in books for anyone willing to make a small effort. What I am trying to say, really, is that I am disappointed to find veteran Internet professionals got so hung up on the "Internet" part that they haven't even covered the basic marketing know-how.

Segmentation, to begin with, can be done using such standards as age, gender, presence/absence of kids, and whether the targeted consumers are in the habit of using skin-care products, to name just a few. That is, one who aspires to sell skin care products on the Internet must choose males or females to be one's target clients. That, my friend, would be segmentation at work.

Then, we must proceed to locating the target market. That is, once the potential skin-care product users have been segmented into such groups as males, females, teenage students, and so on, you might then decide to focus your marketing offense on students as people their age supposedly use the Internet most frequently and influence of the Internet supposedly rubs off on them most effectively.

Later on one might find this group of consumers drawn to effective yet rather cheap products as market research on the Internet shows that these people spend quite some time yet not much money on the Net. With this knowledge, it makes sense for the budding eCommerce website to position itself as a "price breaker."

As such, one might start out selling renowned brand-name products at sub-par prices to gain a foothold. To this end, in turn, one must find ways to source inventories at low costs to produce enough force of price competition. Naturally, the best way to do that is buy in large quantities and sell on slim margins.

With the profit model set come the tasks of picking products that are suitable for sales on the Internet, setting prices that are acceptable for the targeted consuming populations, and finally, deciding through what to have these products sold. As for that last question, one can usually choose among the options of setting up one's own website, registering with an auction website, and setting itself up as a supplier to some portal site and having them do the selling for you.

Such considerations, however, have nothing to do with whether you plan on setting up your store online or offline. Whether you are basing your store along a business street, inside a department, or hawking your stuff squatting on the ground, you will all go through the identical set of considerations. That is, where you can best meet your targeted consumers and how much it costs to maintain one's business model of choice in terms of distribution, rent, and merchandise.

Once these elements are in order, one should then proceed with promotions. For instances, one can have product A and product B sold bundled to prod sales or one can offer a small sample of product D to buyers of product C in case consumers might find product D equally intriguing.

On thing especially noteworthy about the Internet is its ability to carry real-time interaction. That is, whatever your product mix is, you can now very soon how consumers feel about it and adapt/adjust immediately. After all, product mix welcomed in the bricks-and-mortar outlets is not necessarily hip on the Internet. This is when experience must come into play.

The very last in the long list of an eCommerce website owner's concerns should be through what Internet advertising activities to let consumers in on the fact that you have started a new business, how to fathom the effectiveness of these ads, how to manage your website's newsletter, and how to go about managing your clients so that they will become regulars.

By enlisting a product that I am not particularly familiar as an example, as I did above, I was simply trying to demonstrate a point on Internet marketing. That is, Internet marketing is little different from marketing you've always known. Therefore, there is no need to be overwhelmed by fancy wording in Internet ads or by the sophistication embodied by the newsletter system.

The old-school Internet marketing sees the Internet as a media and a media only. That is why people back then concentrated so much on Internet advertising and seemed blind to the fact that the Internet is also a distribution channel, and indeed, such tilting in emphasis on two equally important halves of eCommerce has proved to be unsustainable. (
2004/03/07 - By Digitalwall.com - Way to
China Internet/Telecom )