The coronavirus is protracted worldwide. Due to the aftermath of the Coronavirus, offline marketing schedules that were scheduled have been canceled one after another, and many places are experiencing setbacks in their future plans. In this situation, 'online marketing is rapidly emerging as a substitute for offline marketing. In this post, we will discuss exactly what online marketing is, why it is important, and which strategy to use.
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| What is Online Marketing? – Importance and Strategy |
Online Marketing – Definition, Types, and Importance
What is Online Marketing?
Online marketing is a method of using web-based channels to spread a message about a company's brand, product, or service to potential customers. The goal of online marketing is to reach potential customers through online channels where people do a variety of activities, such as shopping, reading, or watching videos.
Types of Online Marketing
Online marketing is a concept that contrasts with offline marketing, but it is a very broad concept. Therefore, online marketing includes marketing methods in various fields, and the following types of representative online marketing exist.
- SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
- display advertising
- PPC (Search Advertising)
- video marketing
Why Online Marketing Matters
It is no exaggeration to say that online marketing dominates the advertising strategies of most companies these days. What are the advantages that many companies focus on? Online marketing offers the following benefits:
- Low cost: Online marketing tends to be cheaper compared to offline marketing. With some strategies, like social media, being absolutely free, new firms with limited resources can quickly reach their target audience.
- Ease of performance measurement and analysis: If you use an analytics tool such as Google Analytics, you can track the performance of your online advertising and marketing. Analytics can help you define your target audience, identify the types of content that perform well, and revise your marketing strategy to achieve more effective results.
- Long-term exposure: Certain types of online marketing, including SEO and some sponsored ads, will last for a long time. It's very cost-effective because you get a lot of results for an up-front cost.
- Reach a large audience: You can reach a significant number of people through SEO, social media marketing, advertising, and more. If you create content that engages people, especially on social media, it will spread more than you think.
- Develop customer relationships: Your target audience is more likely to see your ad online time and time again. The higher the brand awareness, the faster they will start to recognize the brand, and the more they see a particular brand, the more they will trust it. As a result, online marketing strengthens the relationship between the customer and the brand.
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| What is Online Marketing? – Importance and Strategy |
Factors Influencing Your Online Marketing Strategy
These days, you can find a lot of small and medium-sized companies that do marketing only online without any offline marketing activities. How do you know if your business needs online or digital marketing? Many factors influence decision-making when it comes to marketing. Factors such as your business, budget, and labor resources. We have compiled a list of 5 key factors that can influence your online marketing strategy.
1. The nature of the business
The intrinsic nature of your business is the most important factor in determining your online marketing needs. If your business involves computer software, hardware, or technology, not to mention online activity. So what about the food and beverage business? Do restaurants, cafes, and bars need online marketing?
The answer is 'yes'. Regardless of the size of your business or the intrinsic nature of your business, online activities are essential to gain a competitive edge. Therefore, whether or not to engage in online marketing activities is no longer a subject of discussion, it is important to know how much the scope of online marketing activities should be expanded.
For example, if you run a small cafe, you don't need to consider Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and create a luxurious website that offers a mobile user interface. This is because, when considering the return on investment (ROI), the cost of managing a website is unlikely to bring that much return. That's why instead of creating a website, it's better to create and run a social media account that is useful for promoting your cafe. Given these days of social media trends, Instagram might be a good choice. Create an Instagram account for the cafe and post photos of the cafe menu, latte art, cafe interior, etc. that people may be curious about.
2. Marketing Budget
For most companies, the marketing budget is a big constraint. In particular, if the return on investment is considered a key KPI indicator, it is often necessary to review each marketing activity several times to see if the time and cost required are worthwhile. The same goes for online marketing. Most small companies are difficult to bear the cost of building and managing websites as well as online advertisements such as search advertisements. Therefore, finding a way to use the existing marketing budget more efficiently is the key. For online marketing, you don't even spend 100 won and you can do marketing.
Inbound marketing has started to become very popular in the last few years. Providing useful information to potential customers can lead to increased traffic and sales. As opposed to offline or traditional marketing, you can achieve these results without out-of-pocket expenses.
3. the Target market
It is very important to understand your target market accurately to determine whether you should focus your marketing efforts offline or online. Is your business B2B or B2C? In some industries or cultures, offline activities are more important because B2B marketing is mainly determined by the relationship with individual customers or word of mouth. Online marketing in this environment requires all you have to do is create a simple website that describes your products and services, giving customers the impression that you are the right company.
In the case of B2C, on the other hand, online activity depends on the characteristics of the target market.
Offline, traditional approaches may be more effective if your target audience is older, and online marketing is even more important in a market targeting a young, tech-savvy audience.
4. Geographic Limiting Factors
Offline marketing is limited to the region where your company is located. But online marketing can reach a wider audience. Businesses based in Korea can also target the American and European markets. Online marketing can be the best marketing option, especially if your business is sold to consumers around the world in the form of goods rather than services.
5. Changing consumer expectations
In a similar vein to point 3 (Target Market), understanding consumer expectations and behavior is a great guide in determining your marketing approach. Just as consumers expect to drink their favorite beverage in a comfortable atmosphere when they think of a cafe, consumers have minimum expectations they want to achieve in any company or business. This, of course, depends on the nature of the business, as mentioned in the first paragraph. A small cafe doesn't need a website that considers advanced technology, but if a company that sells consumer goods or services does not go online, it can not only earn customers' trust but also affect the rise and fall of the company's business.
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| What is Online Marketing? – Importance and Strategy |
Online Marketing Strategies to Increase Customer Satisfaction
When you visit a clothing store to look around for autumn clothes, what do you think of when the clerk follows you and talks to you, and treats you excessively? 'I feel burdened', 'uncomfortable', and even 'sorry' tend to come to mind. That is why, in recent years, there have been many places where clothing store employees do not respond to customers first but respond to customers when they ask for help.
The calculation that a new way of dealing with customers increases customer satisfaction may have played a part in the reason for abandoning the traditional customer service strategy and adopting a new service method. So, how do you deal with customers online? In this post, we will look at the 4 rules of online marketing strategy to increase customer satisfaction.
1. Finding what the customer needs
The biggest influence on a company's success is its customers. If you can't figure out what your customers need, your business or your entire company may go out of business. The same is true when interacting with customers online. If you can't figure out what kind of interaction your customers want, you'll lose them. In particular, today's customers are exposed to so many marketing and promotional messages, so it's easy to tell which companies have a true marketing strategy and which companies are marketing just targeting the wallets of consumers.
When developing an online marketing strategy, you must first determine what your customers want. Otherwise, if the company only delivers the story the company wants to tell, customers will easily get bored, and in the worst case, the competitor may lose customers.
So how do you know what your customers want?
- Customer Reviews: If you are selling your company's products through your own shopping mall or through other e-commerce sites such as Amazon or Gmarket, read the customer reviews written there. You can identify common complaints and requests for improvement people have about your products.
- Email Marketing: If you're constantly sending out newsletters to customers to get your company's message out, check out which newsletters, with which titles and what content, get the most response. You can estimate the email open rate and click-through rate.
- Analytics: If you're using an analytics tool like Google Analytics, you can get enough data about your customers. In particular, you can view relevant information through demographic data (interests of site visitors, region, gender, etc.) provided in the Audience menu.
- Social Media: If you run social media, such as Facebook, Google Plus, or Twitter, as part of your social marketing, find out which posts have the highest responses from people. Basic analytics tools built into social media platforms allow you to gain insight into what your customers like and dislike.
- Market Trends: You can find out what topics people are interested in recently by searching for keywords of interest in tools such as Google Trends.
- Keywords: Find out what keywords people use to visit our website. You can understand customer needs more intuitively than the various methods mentioned above.
If your customer data analysis reveals that people are interested in striped shirts, you need to take a corresponding online marketing strategy. For example, you could write content about matching outfits with a striped shirt or run a promotion that gives you an extra discount when you buy two shirts.
Note: Identifying customer needs through customer reviews, emails, analytics, social media, market trends, and the influx of keywords
2. Don't try to convey too much information
It's important to educate customers about our company, but throwing too much information at once is not a good marketing strategy. When people see too many letters in front of them, they ask, 'How long will it take to read all of this?' have the same thoughts as Negative thoughts that start to build up in the minds of customers before they even read the article. That's why marketers need to learn to value their customers' time.
When potential customers visit your website, you need to be able to tell them what value your product/service provides to them. If multiple pop-up windows are displayed to customers as soon as they access the website and multiple images and links are exposed in the sidebar, we recommend that you reconsider the configuration of the website immediately. Discover key keywords related to our company and plan a website configuration that can deliver the most important message to customers. Key keywords can be used not only in website construction but also in future content marketing strategies.
Note: convey a few messages with key keywords rather than a hundred rhetoric
3. Don't bore customers
Have you heard of the Rule of 7? In marketing, consumers are exposed to promotional and marketing content for a product/service at least 7 times before making a purchase decision for that product/service. I can't say the number 7 is accurate, but at least you can guess that you need to engage with potential customers quite often, right?
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| What is Online Marketing? – Importance and Strategy |
There are many ways in which a company delivers a message to consumers, such as TV advertisements, radio advertisements, search advertisements, blogs, social media, and email. At this time, do not always copy and paste the same content, but talk with consumers through content marketing strategies in a slightly colorful way while showing your company's identity.
For example, when running an email campaign, it's a good idea to organize a storyline rather than send out similar promotional content over and over again. In the first email, you introduce your brand and service, in the second email you talk about business-related difficulties or problems that potential customers may be experiencing, and in the third email, a success story of a customer whose performance has improved through your service. You can configure it by putting.
Note: Avoid passing the same message by copy-pasting (copy-and-paste)
4. Don't surprise (uncomfortably) customers
People like surprises positively. I thought the clothes were only 10% off, but when I went to the checkout counter, it was an additional discount and I got a 20% discount, which is a good surprise from the customer's point of view. On the other hand, what if you are purchasing a product online, but when you reach the checkout page, you find out that you have to pay for shipping as well as various additional charges?
Some customers will immediately close the site window and give up on their purchases, while others will make a purchase this time to cry and eat mustard because the time they have spent so far is wasted. In the long run, these uncomfortable surprises hurt customer relationships.
Inconvenient surprises don't just happen in the payment-related part. When consumers make online purchases, they seek and study as much information as possible about a product. At this time, consumers browse through various web pages such as frequently asked questions (FAQ) and size guide pages on the company website.
What if a 404 error occurs saying 'webpage not found when you click on the FAQ page? You may end up turning to a competitor's product because you can't find the information you're looking for, delaying your purchase until a 404 error is fixed, or losing trust with a company that doesn't manage their website and giving up on your purchase. Not only the 404 page, but also when the website loading speed is too slow, the online customer service is below expectations, or the payment system error occurs frequently.
Note: Steady management of customer contact points
Online Marketing FAQ
What are the advantages of online marketing?
- low cost
- Ease of easy performance measurement and analysis
- long-term exposure
- Reach a large audience
- Build relationships with customers
What is the relationship between online marketing and SEO?
SEO is a type of online marketing. In addition to SEO, online marketing includes PPC, social media marketing, and content marketing.
What are the factors to consider when developing an online marketing strategy?
- business personality
- marketing budget
- target market
- geographic constraint
- Changes in consumer expectations.
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