The Online Marketing Mix

Creating an online marketing strategy uses much the same planning process one would employ in the off-line world; namely examining and adjusting product, price, place and promotion to meet consumer demands. The difference online is how the environment and mechanisms at play affect the way we choose to approach the four P’s. There are certain areas where a sea-change is present between the online and off-line worlds and others where the changes are hardly significant at all. In this article we will seek to explore the various elements that affect the online marketing mix and influence the planning and execution of the marketing strategy and show you how and where you can exploit the online environment to your advantage.

Traditional Limitations

Whilst the four P’s offer us a great structured way of thinking about the marketing task we must also being aware of the limitations of this approach that does not identify financial objectives and profitability as core objectives, and also the limitation this model has when applied to business-2-business marketing and services marketing.

Each marketing strategy must be considered on its own merits and be crafted to meet business demands as well as consumer demands. Inevitably, profitability needs to be considered, and we might want to think of it as more than a junior partner to the four P’s in all planning, as it the raison d’etre of most business operations.

Let us then consider the four P’s and how they come into play online. This subject matter could fill a couple of books so please forgive us if we just give you the whistle-stop tour on this outing.

Product

When we talk of product it may prove useful to qualify our terms and indicated that we mean product in the broader sense, so that it encompasses not just a product, but also the brand and user experience. So by ‘product’ we mean your offering to the consumer.

So what makes the online environment different? Let us look at some factors that change the way we need to think about the product.

1. Tangible versus Remote

In the online world all products are remote. They cannot be touched, examine or explored in a tangible sense. They must be experienced through another media, whether that is images and text, video, audio, or a multimedia presentation. Therefore, whilst in the offline world goods can often be picked up and examined by the consumer, this is never the case online. So what challenges, limitations and changes does this impose and how do we find solutions to overcome the deficit of tactile feedback the consumer usually receives?

In the absence of something I can touch I need the next best thing - a heightening of the other senses so to speak. This means images must be large and clear; I must be able to see a variety of angles and close-up of features and detailing. I must also be able to read descriptions that explain the unique selling points and all the key features; I also need the specifications and properties such as dimensions, sizes, weights and measures, materials and finishes. The way this information is laid out and presented needs to be intuitive and accessible, with any options that can modify the basic product offering made apparent with strong visual cues as well as textual based information. If the product is complex or highly technical, or the sales process is particularly complex you may wish to consider multi-media or video content to impart unique selling points and guide the user into the right decision to meet their circumstance and needs. Remember, most importantly usability studies turn up time and again that the lack of clear information is a key factor in the user failing to reach a purchasing decision.

2. Emotive versus Informative

Traditional advertising and marketing leans heavily into the emotive spectrum - utilising qualities such as aspiration, desire, self-image and self-worth to play on consumer conscious and subconscious behaviour. In many ways the web is no different, and with a wealth of channels for multimedia, video, audio and display communications, it is possible to operate using a similar model through various web platforms. However, the medium of the web does lean considerably in the direction of information (text and data) and we must be aware that any online marketing campaign must recognise this, and address it. Marketing in an information retrieval environment means understanding how information is collated, sorted and presented to the consumer.

At the macro level we have search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and MSN Live that spider the internet and find, analyse and evaluate web documents and data based on their relevancy algorithms, so they can present the user with a raft of possible web pages and files for any given search. Knowing how to reach consumers via the search engines is then a key mechanism affecting the online marketing mix.

At the micro level of the web page understanding how consumer cognition and viewing patterns differ on the web from the off-line world, and the effect this has on design considerations for layouts and visual scales over normal aesthetic and emotive considerations must also come into play.

Even the unseen elements such as code and database design need to be part of your marketing thought process - just like a noisy car irritates the driver, a slow website with bloated code or clumsy functionality will impact on the emotional experience of your brand and product in all steps of the sales process and lifetime.

3. Journey

How does the user first encounter you brand and product? If they know the brand already, when did they first become aware of this specific product? What has led them to narrow-in and focus on this product in particular?

In the off-line world much of this valuable data must be gleaned through expensive market research and consumer studies. In the online world much of this information can be found through various forms of web analytics and reporting data. So it is vital to any company or organisation that wishes to succeed online to realise that many of the tools that will allow them the sharpen and hone their marketing campaign are already at hand, and that any web based project can be set up to not only harvest data about users in general, but also user behaviour.

A simple and effective example of data that can be captured to offer you much greater user insight is recording searches of a website’s internal search tool. This tells you such a wealth of information about how people perceive your business or brand, what they want, how they think about your products, where the gaps in information in your website and online communications are… and so on.

So be aware that within an online marketing campaign there is a much greater opportunity to continuously improve and adjust your marketing message across all the channels such as web, search, display, email, video, audio and multimedia based on analytics and reporting data, because with online marketing the user journey can be tracked and measured.

4. Usability

When we talk about usability and product considerations we generally mean the platform or mechanism by which the message and functionality are delivered to the user. This could be a flash game, a viral video or an enterprise scale e-commerce solution - regardless of what the platform is, from a user perspective it needs to be intuitive so that it is easy to understand how to achieve the task - say to watch the video or buy the product.

So when planning your online marketing campaign across the channels you must always consider the user experience and the utility of whatever you are presenting the offering within. If you are building a website how do you quickly impart who you are and what you do? Where are you going to place your navigation? How should you name your categories and organise the taxonomy? What functionality and information does the user require?

Outside of the creative process and looking at delivery mechanisms in the off-line world there are many standardised formats (6 sheet poster, 30 second TV ad etc.) where you are working with a know quantity, and others such as shop design and layout where understanding consumer behaviour and having great marketing experience come into play in a mechanical delivery sense. The same is true online; and MPU or Skyscraper are known quantities, but how one designs an email to get through spam filters and reach a consumer with the right message and branding is very much akin to designing a shop layout - it is dependent of on experience, sales and marketing instinct and great technical knowledge. The difference online is, I can measure in great depth and detail the key performance indicators of any email broadcast and hone my skills over time using measurable figures at the granular level. The main point here is that you need to have the right skills and experience to ensure the user experience and interaction with your brand and product is as user friendly as it can be - leaving the user with that warm gooey feeling inside them when they think about you brand!

5. Differentiate (USPs)

Once of the mantras of marketing is always to differentiate your product - this allow the consumer to identify yours in a crowd and also gives them a set of reasons to choose your product over the rest. You may not be the cheapest, you may not have the best quality, but there is always a way of making yours different and selling the consumer that difference with a positive outcome.

Online, this need for differentiation is more vital than ever. Imagine you’re looking to buy a new television from a well known manufacturer. So you go to the search engine, type in the manufacturers name and the television model number - you will then get literally hundreds of results which have the phrase matched exactly within their text and thousands more that meet the broad matching criteria of the algorithm. Just looking at the first page of results you’ll see the immediate problem of differentiation - the commonality of many of the offerings.

So how do we get around this? The likelihood is, the nearer to the top of the results you are, the more likely the consumer will be to follow the link to your website. But how does one differentiate in the search engine results pages? How does one make your listing stand out? How does your Adwords paid-search advert get chosen over your competitors’? Does having both organic and paid search listings on the search engine results pages (SERPs) make your offering stand out? Will writing unique page titles with clarity, context and a hook mean your pages are more likely to be pluck by consumers out of the results pages?

You can break this search marketing conundrum down even further - how does the search engine know which copy of the standard manufacturer’s blurb that most listing use in their content to list as most relevant? If you change your product description and web copy to improve topic vocabulary, will this improve the LSI portion of the algorithm, and improve your overall results? Is this all irrelevant if my site has much better link authority than my competitors? These are all sub-consideration of differentiation prior to the user even seeing your offering.

How you describe and pitch your offering will be just as important and has as many considerations - the thing to note here is that online, technical knowledge and experience using different platforms and channels to deliver the message is as important in the process of differentiation as how you would develop the message itself. This is because in many ways it is the technical solution that will bring about differentiation - and therefore you need help from people who know their onions in each of the channels.

6. Conveying Quality

There are a clutch of German car manufacturers recognised globally as makers of quality cars. It is not a single thing that marks them out as being such, but their attention to detail across the board in the way they construct their cars. Likewise with an online marketing strategy - conveying quality is about having the right solutions whether they are technical, aesthetic or creative - the components of a campaign tell you as much about a brand or product as the actual message itself. So when planning a website, email broadcast, paid search campaign or display creative you must be asking yourself about all the trust signals you can muster and how each component can ooze quality - that way when you come to pitch your product to the consumer, subconsciously the battle is half won.

Once the consumer actually encounters your brand and more specifically the product in-hand how are you going to convey quality? As mentioned above, how many times have you looked for an item only to be met with the same product description as lifted straight off the marketing CD - its is moribund and shows a lack of care and attention, and the consumer will smell it a mile off. The fact it does you no favours in natural or paid search ranking algorithms will also rub salt in the wound. So when planning your marketing you need to be aware that communication is about top to tail messaging - there’s no point having a glossy display or email marketing campaign pushing quality traffic through to your website if you then suddenly drop your standards and present a really sloppy product offering. So text and copy should be written specifically for each product; and the copy if used on the web must also try and adhere to search optimisation, semantics, scaled narratives (the inverted pyramid) and scannability to reap all the benefits you can.

Imagery needs to be of the highest quality and standard you can afford. Product images are often overlooked when actually they form the cornerstone of the online sales mechanism. As well as copy and imagery, layout of data and functionality such as calls to action, help and support information, options, prices and downloads will all influence the user experience.

If your design and technical team do indeed know their onions then the consumer will hardly notice, but easily breeze through their task and come away with a positive outcome. Conversely if you do not allow the development of a project to spend time ensuring best practice is followed, the user experience of your offering is likely to be much worse. So drops in quality, whether technical, creative or aesthetic will have a direct impact on your brand and sales.

To recap, design, layout and functionality need to underscore your brand values and big idea. If the online message is not synchronised and working in harmony with your other marketing activities then it is not really part of you brand message and has gone off the reservation and you will be sending mixed messages to the consumer.

7. Customer Service

One of the biggest concerns people have when dealing with a business or organisation online is what one might call the human interaction factor. People want to know that if all else fails they can contact someone who is responsive and customer oriented. With a bricks and mortar business I can pick up the phone and call them, or visit their offices, showroom or retail shop. In the online world this is not always the case, and in fact in some business models this defeats the purpose of the lower operating cost of an online arm. So in some ways there is a slight conflict of interest here; yet there are many technical and practical ways to overcome these shortcomings and allow a business or organisation to not only project the appearance of being customer oriented, but actually be customer oriented without significant impact on the bottom line.

Why is customer service important? Well trust and assurance signals have significant impact in consumer sales online. A major component of trust and assurance is the customer services element. People need to know there is someone on the other end of the line. Additionally, word of mouth (WOM) marketing is a vital mechanism in online marketing, especially in recent years given the rise of social commerce, with consumer organisations, social networks, forums and communities all able to quickly proliferate both good and bad user experiences across the net to a global audience. If brand management is to try and control and influence these phenomena, then being aware on the ‘coalface’ of consumer interaction with you brand is vital. Giving your potential customers this perception of customer orientation is vital too.

8. Re-Sell, Up Sell & Cross Sell

A website is a sales tool as much as a marketing tool, regardless of whether you run e-commerce or not. Remember selling to existing customers is much easier that generating new business - a truism online and off-line. The difference is online you are much more likely to know who your customers are, what they previously purchased and what in your current offering might tickle their fancy. So marketing to your existing customer base should be a linchpin of your marketing campaign. Planning a mailer that touches them regularly will ensure your brand is front of mind, providing nice sales spikes that mirror your efforts.

As well as re-selling to existing clients you must consider how and where you wish to up-sell and cross sell. These mechanisms can be derived from good e-commerce solutions where a range of functionality should be present such as related items, people of bought this also bought that, BOGOF and other sales promotions, promo codes, vouchers etc as standard. But as well as structural sales tools such as these you will need creative and design resources to help with internal promotions using sales lozenges, banners, MPUs etc. Then if we consider the email marketing again - what offers and discounts, up sell and cross sell can you promote? Do you want to run a more direct marketing campaign using paid search and display? All these channels and possibilities need to be considered.

Now the real beauty of online is in the feedback. Your reporting and analytics will tell you what the influence of a display campaign has been in direct traffic and uplift in other channels; it will tell you which one of your BOGOF offer email broadcast drove more traffic to the website and had the best sales conversion ratio, not just the raw sales figures. It is in these powerful reporting mechanisms that the commercial power and marketing insight can be gleaned, and it is in this area where engaging expert knowledge will yield the greatest results.

Price

The three main consideration derived from price are meeting operating costs and overheads, competitor pricing and consumer demand/desire. Let us look at each one of those and see what crops up online.

Overhead

Obviously there are normal business overheads that will be constants regardless of whether you operate online or not, and savings brought about by utilising an online operation such as staff numbers and premises where savings can be made; but lets look at areas relating specifically to online marketing and see how this effects the mix.

The web in all its guises offers as a form of marketing, advertising, and sales tool some of the cheapest and most cost effective types of activity any marketing or sales director can deploy. Not only are you able to reach geographically distant audiences or target specific geographical locations, but your online marketing, sales and advertising message can run twenty-four hours a day, and present a consistent message with honed user journey paths, clear calls to action and conversion mechanisms that you know perform. Add to this the ability to track what works and what does not, to see which keywords are on the money and which do not return on investment, to be able to monitor and track the performance of each channel and campaign, and then you can see how cost efficiencies can be introduced and ROI improved.

Looking at the lifetime cost for a well executed website, including its hosting cost, content provision costs and search optimisation costs we can usually see a very healthy ROI. By adopting best practice in development, information architecture and semantic mark-up a digital agency should be able to ensure you have a future proof structure for your website that adheres to the requirements of information retrieval and search optimisation - meaning the lifetime cost and overhead of this omnipresent advertising and marketing tools is greatly reduced.

With display advertising and paid search advertising (PPC) there is a recurring cost to traffic generation. However, it is both cheaper and more cost effective than many offline alternatives, and it is measurable and instantaneous to deploy. It is also very easy to control and flexible to your needs.  This immediacy and control are keys that make both of these channels very useful mechanisms. This is certainly worth considering in overall price policy when penetration price is a factor and one needs to reach a market in a timely fashion. A website using natural search requires time to develop content, build up relevant links and get connected into its topic area on the web - so search engine optimisation is a medium and long-term solution for cost-effective traffic generation. Paid search and display offer immediate response, so you can launch a website and hit the ground running. There is an ongoing cost for this type of traffic generation, but it can be more profitable to use these methods to reach the market quickly, gain market share and exploit any opportunities that present themselves, than to sit back and wait for the natural search marketing to kick in.

Any decent campaign will have examined the marketing and sales objectives and specified the required ROI that any media buying and paid search needs to attain. In addition to cost-per-thousand (CPM) advertising and cost-per-click/pay-per-click advertising, both search and display have the ability for media buyers to setup cost-per-acquisition (CPA) deals which move the goalposts from marketing budget into the realm of sales budget. For some companies with the right type of products (typically higher value items, and rarely FMCGs) these CPA deals with media and search networks can prove a highly desirable way to attain sales volumes at a known fixed cost. A no-brainer really for many sales directors!

There are other mechanisms online that also offer a vastly superior level of performance in terms of reduced overhead versus results that are also worth considering strongly as part of the marketing mix. One of these is the much talked about, but little used viral marketing mechanism. The reason it is not deployed that widely is that to be viral it often needs to be quite close to the knuckle or very clever. For some brands and products this can work; they might have an edgy or cool brand or a lively and fun brand - so for these brands close to the knuckle and humour based viral campaigns can be very cost-effective way of reaching large audiences at little or no cost other than the creative. But for more traditional and mainstream businesses the controversial approach is less plausible, and therefore other astute and clever viral mechanism are required. For many marketing directors and managers viral can seem off brand or not within the remit of the big idea when planning their marketing mix. We suggest you don’t be put off by the perceived limitation of viral because as a form of marketing it can often punch well above the weight of the same budget deployed in a different channel.

Another form of cost-effective marketing that combines natural search optimisation via link building and user generated content provision, along with online PR and word of mouth - we call it social commerce marketing. Getting into social networks, communities, news channels, forums and blogs, bookmarking sites and developing web 2.0 mechanisms on your own website can reap huge rewards in targeted traffic, brand awareness and activity. The beauty of this form of marketing is that with the right online marketing team onboard who know how to use these channels effectively you can invoke the labour, time, effort and expertise of your customers to help promote and market your brand. So in terms of overhead, you cannot afford not to consider this channel as part of the online brand development and sales strategies. Using social media as an integral part of your online marketing strategy is a great way to help build engagement with your audience. Brand loyalty  and advocacy often are built not just on your brand message, but on interaction with your audience - social media allows you to interact and engage your audience with a range of technologies provided within the blogosphere and social network space such as user-generated content, mash-ups, polls, games, video, audio, blog comments and forums.

Competitor Pricing

The web is a fairly cut-throat environment when it comes to pricing. But just as your competitors can see your entire product pricing, you can also see theirs. This means you need to be both flexible and responsive within the context of an overarching price strategy. But remember that regardless of what you competitor sets his price at, you have the tools of differentiation, quality and trust signals to overcome what ostensibly might seem a futile battle. Also remember that with your search marketing strategy, whether paid or natural search, you can also offset price comparison by being top of the heap. The traffic volumes received by those in the top positions can significantly increase the chances of you converting sales and remaining very competitive. Also remember where you have great products with less competition, plus good paid search or natural search in place, you can use a price skimming policy and raise the price of these items to offset cost in less lucrative product areas. Conversely you can also market loss leaders to increase activity, allowing up sell and cross sell (the classic technique in this vein is using a loss leading product to gain customer data which you can then market to with DM or email marketing).

As well as product price consideration about your competitors you might also want to consider how competitor pricing in paid search is to be handled. Do you want to take them on directly and gain market share by out biding them, or do you want to use affiliates as a stalking horse, or do you want to merely track them from a lower vantage point in the results - all of these consideration need to be discuss with a view to ROI, marketing strategy and what your online marketing experts feel is the most effective and profitable means for you to reach your objectives.

Consumer Demand & Desire

How do you make your product and brand more desirable? Your online campaign will need to prop up any brand values and slot seamlessly into the big idea. It will need to put the right message in front of the right eyeballs, and entice them to take the path you want. It will need to stimulate awareness, then interest and then desire.

This is where the really big concepts such as the big idea and all the brand values really come into play. It is in the esoteric qualities of a brand, those intangible aspects that make you feel like it is the right fit for you that makes a product desirable as much as the qualities of the actual product itself. Luxury and designer brands have known this for sometime and exploit the merits of their brands as much as the products themselves to command significantly higher values for these items. So when planning you marketing strategy you must ask yourself what makes both my brand and my products desirable to my target audience?

In addition to the larger strategic pieces of the marketing mix puzzle you can also look at the smaller elements whose effect can be significant to consumer demand and desire. Product photography can elevate a product or sink it without a trace; email marketing aesthetics and visual message are as important as the message in the copy; having a one-stop-shop for an entire product range can be most tempting to a consumer; having limited edition or exclusive distribution of a product is equally as enticing. So think about your promotions and marketing messages and how you will tempt and entice users to become consumers.

Place

In terms of differences between the online marketing considerations of place and the off-line considerations there are differences that can have significant impact on the way you do business. These include geography (the internet gives you access to a global market), more practical issues of fulfilment and distribution within regions and geographic zones, and lastly whether using third-parties such as affiliates is something you want to consider for you product. We will discuss these three considerations.

1. Geography

International Natural Search

In the good old days before local search you could truly market to a global audience - which was fantastic if you were marketing something for a multinational audience. Nowadays things are a little more involved; but with some effort and a bit more budget no matter how competitive the foreign market already is, you can compete.

If you want the site to perform in highly competitive foreign natural search markets then you need to consider the likes of local domains (i.e. if marketing to Germany make sure you own the .de domain suffix version of your website and host it on a server with a German IP block), ensure you have a native language version hosted on the local server (i.e. German language website in German and English in Australia - but different content to your British website that is both relevant to the local market and also does not flout duplicate content spam issues). As well as a native server and language version of the website, you’ll need separate link reputation building strategies as it is a separate domain name. However, these are not insurmountable tasks and can be achieved with decent planning and project management. So although applying natural search optimisation in competitive foreign markets does require additional resource if one wants to compete against local operators, it is entirely doable.

Before you run off all guns blazing ready to annihilate the foreign competition remember that all natural search relies on link reputation for a major component of the relevancy algorithm - so depending on the competitiveness of the market you might not need a foreign domain name and translated website hosted in the country you are marketing to. In many cases just getting foreign links pointing to your website with the appropriate keyword in the link title will often do the trick. So if enough German websites link to your site saying the magic keyword in German, chances are, in less competitive markets you’ll appear well in the natural search results. Getting these links into your site in the foreign language is therefore desirable - and this can be achieved via standard link development especially using social media and targeted PR.

International Paid Search & Display

A simple and easy way to reach a foreign market without having a multi-region website is through paid search or display advertising. By creating translated landing pages and pushing localised display and paid search traffic through to your distribution network one can easily achieve market exposure without too much hassle at all.

International Affiliate Networks

Another method would be to establish local agents who recruit and establish a local affiliate network with the fulfilment handled locally under the direction of your agent.

Reaching a National Audience

For SMEs in particular online marketing allows you to reach a national market that may be unattainable with a traditional off-line marketing budgets. As mentioned online marketing it all is various guises is an ideal and cost-effective method of reaching a national audience with targeted and topic focused campaigns, whether that be natural search, paid search, display, social commerce or viral. So if you want to grow, increase your market share and find new customers and business, online might well be the answer you’ve been looking for.

Localised Marketing Campaigns

Both display advertising and paid search advertising offer regional and localise solutions. If you operated in a defined geographic area then both these channels can be optimised and targeted to meet this need.

If you are thinking about natural search on a localised basis ensure good localised linking, and amend your website’s information architecture and content to reflect the nature of the localised keywords you are seeking to target.

2. Online Visibility

Where you appear online is important. Will the brand and product be solely distributed by you, or do you operate through a distribution network. Will you use affiliates to market your products. If you use display and paid search, does the network they will be displayed on help or hinder you brand and product?

Recently a social-network who shall remain nameless was discovered to have a cabal from the far-right lurking in their midst - the question is would you want your brand’s display advertising campaign appearing in these areas? Could you ever afford to be seen to condone or endorse an extremely contentious issue or group like this? These are thorny issues and ones where protection of the brand and active brand guardianship within the context of your online marketing campaign need much consideration.

3. Fulfilment & Distribution

If due to the possibilities presented to you by online marketing channels you start operating nationally or internationally where beforehand you did not a major consideration is fulfilment and distribution. What will your shipping fees be? How will you pass this cost on to the consumer or absorb it? Do you currently have the right distribution network? How will current stock and warehousing be integrated with any web sales? Will you buy and hold stock specifically for the online channel? How will you pick and pack? Will this be done in-house or do you require a third party? Do you have the capacity to grow and handle that growth? In many ways these are just business issues, but they are ones that occur again and again with businesses who start to actively market online and suddenly see massive spikes in demand and orders that they sometimes can struggle to meet. In many ways many of these issues relating to fulfilment and distribution also touch on brand defining elements such as packaging and insert marketing materials, delivery and customer service. So our advice would be to consider these elements carefully in your business plan as it is often these operational issues that can undermine even the most successful online marketing campaigns.

Promotion

Well we have discussed many of the issues of promotion and the channels available to the online marketer, but just to recap these are some of the main avenues one can take in online promotion:-

Natural (Organic) Search Marketing - Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

What is it?
This online marketing technique optimises websites to adhere to the criteria sort by the major search engines (Google, Yahoo! and MSN) and their relevancy algorithms. The aim is to get your web pages in the top positions on the search engine results pages for target keywords using the website’s content and link authority to match the requirements of the search algorithm. The result should be targeted and qualified traffic to the website.

Advantages
Once established it drives high volumes of free qualified traffic in to your website as a long-term solution. There are websites built back in the dawn of the Google era with great SEO strategies that followed the legitimate ‘white-hat’ principles of information retrieval that are still operating with great success now, and will do so for the foreseeable future, as the basic methodology of this approach remains unchanged. SEO scalability is also brilliant, so as you add products and services to your website and grow - your marketing budget does not need to keep apace as the search engine index is bringing your new products to market for free.

Disadvantages
Technically difficult to achieve for those who want to take on established website and requiring resource to establish content and link reputation. Also this approach is not instantaneous and needs time to establish itself and circumvent things like Google’s ’sandbox’ quarantine period for new domain names.

Paid Search Marketing - Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

What is it?
This online marketing channel allows advertisers to pay for listings adverts that appear on the search engine results pages and across the search engines’ SERPs and their content networks.

Advantages
PPC is characterised by immediacy and control. You can reach a target audience incredibly quickly in a cost effective manner for the keywords you want with the advert copy you desire. The degree of reporting, transparency and measurability makes this a flexible and accountable channel. Additionally the data provided from this form of marketing offers you great insight and market research that can be used to influence the entire marketing mix. There is also a halo effect when running PPC alongside natural search leading to higher traffic volumes than either channel would provide individually.

Disadvantages
PPC is a marketplace where bid prices compete to determine positioning (now qualified with a relevancy algorithm on all the major network that assesses how germane your advert, landing pages and website are to the search keyword). So to a degree, big purses tend to prevail as they can out bid the minnows.  Also it is an expendable on-going cost, so what you spend this month to achieve a level of traffic you must also spend next month.

Display Advertising

What is it?
Display advertising uses banners, leader boards, skyscrapers and MPU display panels to deliver a creative message to the audience by appearing on targeted website. The display units can deliver multimedia and streaming content, and interact with the user.

Advantages
Well targeted campaigns can be very cost effective in sales and lead generation. The volumes of eyeballs and flexibility of the creative in the visual display offer great branding power to the advertiser. Display also offers excellent reporting and feedback that can be used to hone the marketing message. The advent of cost-per-acquisition (CPA) deals also present fantastic sales and marketing opportunities. A significant advantage of certain display units is their interactivity, allowing you to interact with the consumer directly.

Disadvantages
One of the difficulties is coordinating the creative process, media buying and network analytics for best outcomes. Quite often these three elements are handled by different bodies meaning a high degree of account management and liaison are require to achieve the right outcome - we suggest engaging a party that takes a unified approach so you get joined-up thinking for the campaign’s lifecycle. Another factor to be aware of is “banner blindness”, so just because 1 million eyeballs have seen your creative does not mean it has reached them all.

Email Marketing (Emarketing)

What is it?
This is the broadcast of a marketing message to an audience on a list in an email format. This can be to a known customer base that have opted in or to a purchased or rented list of people willing to receive info from third parties. As the former are targeted and more responsive to your message the idea is to actively build-up your opt-in list through broadcasts and other marketing and sales activity.

Advantages
Email is almost universally used by all Internet users and cited by 96% as a reason to go online. Email marketing also represents a fraction of the cost of traditional DM mailers. Well executed email marketing is shown to give a significant boost to sales and marketing activity, with response rates of the opt-in audience being one of the highest seen in any online channel. Because of the instantaneous nature of broadcast delivery and user response, you can see sales and marketing activity occur within minutes rather than weeks. With great creative and reliable templates, email broadcasts can be produced quickly and efficiently. You can tailor the message to your audience because you know who they are - segmentation of your email channel is key to optimisation.

Disadvantages
Requires a list of opt-in users to be most effective, so list building and data harvesting are required to acquire opt-in users - this can mean buying and renting lists regularly to help build up your list data or running incentivised sign-up campaigns. Also broadcasting can be a thorny area - firstly your email templates need to reach the audience - so you need to known how to circumvent spam filters and display issues with web-mail and email-client applications, and secondly you should always use a third party for broadcast who know all the spam laws and best practice - to ensure you protect your domain and brand and don’t get blacklisted with the ISPs or other authorities.

Social Commerce (Web 2.0 Marketing)

What is it?
Applying online marketing activity to a host of different channels that fall under the banner of web 2.0 - these can be social networks such as MySpace and Facebook, community sites within the market sector, forum, blogs and user-generated-content (UGC) websites, news, media and PR channels, and bookmarking website. The idea is to seed debate, discussion, interest, and activity and raise product and brand awareness. You can instigate “link baiting” and UGC for the benefit of you own website, so the audience is contributing to your marketing mix.

Advantages
Some of the major advantages of these various mechanisms are brand and product awareness, using consumer resources to help build links and increase brand advocacy and loyalty, capitalising on the potency of word-of-mouth marketing and reaching highly targeted audiences and market strata.

Disadvantages
It requires a deft touch - you don’t want to appear to be working on behalf of “The Man” or “Astroturfing” (fake grass roots behaviour) as it will shatter your credibility - so genuine friendships, acquaintances and networking are best routes to market. You also need your ducks line up, as once you enter this arena you no longer have control of the message - so you must try and shape the message within the context of dynamic human interaction - i.e. this is a political activity firstly - if you get the politics right the commercial benefits will take care of themselves.

Viral Marketing

What is it?
Any form of marketing that models the spread of a pathogen using a word-of-mouth social distribution model that is self-perpetuating. The message must be easy to distribute and pass on to your peers, and will need an incentive to trigger distribution - whether that is an offer, humorous content, or a call-to-arms. The trick of good viral is identifying a decent distribution trigger that falls within the brand message and objectives of the campaign.

Advantages
Viral marketing has the potential to deliver you a big bang for your buck if successful. Well executed offer-led campaigns such as Threshers famous 40% Off special offer voucher that was “accidentally” able to be copied and distributed to anyone can have huge impact on sales and brand awareness.

Disadvantages
Coming up with a decent distribution trigger is that is not beyond-the-pale is difficult and requires talent and fine judgment in the creative process. The ability to go too far or off brand is all too easy in the pursuit of humour, controversy or offer benefits. A classic example of this is the infamous VW Polo terrorist viral which Volkswagen have stated categorically was not part of the marketing mix.

Conclusion

So there you have some of the range of considerations that you might want to ponder when planning your online marketing strategy. We have not really gone into too much detail as we limited this post to a quick overview of what you might need to know - but we hope in the coming days, weeks and months to put a little more flesh on the bones of each of the online marketing channels.