When implementing online marketing, a company should first determine a suitable online marketing management model based on its own characteristics and the features of its industry. The company must understand the significant benefits and costs brought by introducing online marketing management and set clear numerical indicators for these benefits and costs. Only then can the objectives of marketing management be clearly defined, and accordingly, the tasks of the online marketing department will also be clearly delineated.
Increase transparency in competitive research:
- Understand competitors' conditions. This can be done by directly visiting competitors' web pages to learn about their new products, prices, services, etc.; or by reading content on news groups and mailing lists related to competitors to understand consumers' evaluations of their products and services. At the same time, it allows timely understanding of consumers' assessments of your own company or comparisons with competitors.
- Understand the development of the industry. Through information provided by online news service providers and discussions in specialized news groups and mailing lists, sensitive companies may capture trends in the development of their industry.
- Achieve cooperation with other enterprises. Information from online companies might attract interest from retailers, distributors, and agents around the world. They may contact you after market analysis if they believe your product has market potential, wanting to become your distributor. This way, you establish connections with enterprises in various regions worldwide, and similar cooperative relationships can also be established through the network.
Market Expansion:
- Understand potential customers through designing questionnaires on the company's webpage to investigate the situation of potential customers.
- Support online marketing through other media (such as magazines, TV, radio). Potential customers seeing the company’s website on other media might strengthen their impression and pay more attention to the website's content online.
- Invite potential customers to participate in seminars and product exhibitions.
Sales:
- Sell new products to new markets.
- Sell old products to new markets.
- Sell old products to new international markets.
- Sell products that have poor flow in distribution channels.
- Sell products unsuitable for general product catalogs. When a company has a wide range of products, it cannot describe product performance in detail in the catalog, but the internet can achieve this.
- Quickly and conveniently send instant price adjustment information, discount information, and new product information. The cost of E-mail is almost zero, so online companies can contact potential customers at an extremely low cost.
- Test products and prices. Online information can be updated instantly and inexpensively, allowing companies to test almost all marketing variables.
- Change product displays according to customer or seasonal changes. Clothing merchants can design different contents on different web pages based on customer classification.
- Sales on the network can be direct online sales (mainly downloadable computer software), or customers can be directed to local distribution stores through online marketing, like Kodak does not sell directly online.
- Provide downloadable and printable coupons on the webpage. Potential customers can obtain these coupons by visiting the webpage and get discounts when purchasing goods at local stores with the coupons. This method achieves both increasing website visits and promoting sales.
- Use the network to promote transactions between enterprises.
- Provide background knowledge through the network to let customers self-learn and cultivate them into experts of the company's products.
- Dynamically display products using multimedia technology.
- Manage product catalogs more effectively. Due to effective online marketing, Attitudes Company stopped printing over 2.5 million product catalogs and reduced 12 managers.
Public Relations:
- Establish friendly relations with journalists. Through the network, detailed answers can be quickly given according to journalists' needs and questions.
- Announce company policy changes immediately to journalists, employees, and consumers.
- Eliminate misleading information. Through the supervision of specially appointed network information supervisors, inaccurate information about the company in news groups or email lists can be corrected in time, avoiding consumer distortion.
- Hold press conferences online. People who cannot attend the press conference can understand its content through the network (synchronously or after the event).
Customer Service:
- Understand customer satisfaction with the company's products, consumption preferences, and reactions to new products through customer feedback.
- Accurately understand consumers' psychological and decision-making processes.
- Establish a "one-to-one" close relationship with customers through E-mail.
- Accurately segment the target market and send information or advertisements specifically serving these customers to them based on this segmentation.
- Timely convey new product information and upgraded service information to them by replying to customers' questions, maintaining long-term friendly relationships with customers.
- Identify dissatisfied customers in time, understand the reasons for their dissatisfaction, and handle it promptly.
- Establish a loyal customer database. Loyal customers who are very familiar with the company's products can participate in the company's online marketing, help solve consumers' problems, answer some technical questions, and remind the company which consumers post unfavorable information about the company online.
Online Advertising:
- Test online advertising effects. All activities online are trackable, so companies can accurately study the decision-making process of consumer purchasing behavior and test the promotional role of advertisements.
- Combine other media to increase online advertising results.
Reduce product support costs:
- Effectively reduce the cost of manual responses to consumer product consultations through FAQs.
- Streamline employees. When customers are accustomed to network product support, the company can streamline the employees in the product support department or train them to solve higher-level problems.
- Customers can obtain product support through the network at any time because the network can truly achieve 24-hour service, undoubtedly increasing customer satisfaction.
- Online product support can provide customers with detailed answers to questions and background knowledge, allowing customers to self-learn and become product experts, solving problems themselves when issues arise later.
- Encourage customers to purchase upgrades or new products. Once customers can solve their own problems, they will be interested in continuing to deepen their understanding of the product.
Strengthen brand image:
- Expand brand image. Customers loyal to a certain brand will look for detailed information about this brand online.
- Companies with famous brands should introduce relevant online thematic articles.