When carrying out online marketing, a company should first determine an appropriate online marketing management model based on its own characteristics and the features of the industry it is in. The company should understand the significant benefits and costs that introducing online marketing management will bring, and set clear quantitative indicators for these benefits and costs. Only then can the goals of marketing management be clearly defined, and accordingly, the tasks of the online marketing department will also be clearly outlined.
Increase the transparency of competitive research:
- Understand the status of competitors. This can be done by directly visiting the competitor's webpage to learn about their new products, prices, services, etc.; or by reading content on news groups and mailing lists related to competitors to understand consumer evaluations of their products and services. At the same time, timely information about consumer evaluations of your own enterprise or comparisons with competitors can be obtained.
- Understand the development of the industry. Through information provided by online news services and discussions in specialized news groups and mailing lists, sensitive enterprises may capture trends in the development of their industry.
- Achieve collaboration with other enterprises. Information from online enterprises may attract interest from retailers, distributors, and agents around the world. They may, through market analysis, consider your product to have market potential and thus proactively contact you, wanting to become your distributor. In this way, connections with enterprises in various regions around the world are established, and similar cooperative relationships can also be built through the network.
Market Expansion:
- Understand potential customers by 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 URL on other media may strengthen their impression and pay more attention to the content of the URL 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 do not flow smoothly through distribution channels.
- Sell products that do not fit general product catalogs. When a company has many products, it cannot detail product performance in the catalog, but the network can achieve this.
- Quickly and conveniently send real-time price adjustment information, discount information, new product information. The cost of E-mail is almost zero, so online companies can maintain timely contact with potential customers at extremely low costs.
- Test products and prices. Online information can be updated instantly and inexpensively, allowing companies to test all marketing variables.
- Change product displays according to customer or seasonal changes. Clothing merchants can design different content on different web pages based on customer classifications.
- Sales on the network can be direct online sales (mainly downloadable computer software), or through online marketing to guide customers to local distribution stores. For example, Kodak does not sell directly online.
- Provide downloadable printable coupons on the webpage. Potential customers can obtain these coupons by visiting the webpage and receive discounts when purchasing goods at local stores with these coupons. This method achieves two purposes: first, it increases website traffic and allows more consumers to know the company; second, it promotes sales.
- Use the network to promote transactions between enterprises.
- Use the background knowledge provided by the network to let customers self-learn and cultivate them into experts in the company's products.
- Use multimedia technology to dynamically display products.
- 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 relationships with journalists. Through the network, detailed answers can be quickly given according to the needs and questions of journalists.
- Instantly announce policy changes to journalists, employees, and consumers.
- Eliminate misleading information. Through the supervision of dedicated network information monitors, 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 the content of the press conference through the network (synchronously or after the meeting).
Customer Service:
- Understand customer satisfaction with the company's products, consumption preferences, and reactions to new products through customer feedback information.
- Accurately understand the consumer's psychology and decision-making process.
- 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 based on this segmentation.
- Timely convey new product information and upgraded service information to them by replying to customer questions, maintaining long-term friendly relations with customers.
- Identify dissatisfied customers in time, understand the reasons for their dissatisfaction, and handle it in time.
- Build a loyal customer database. Loyal customers who are very familiar with the company's products can participate in the company's online marketing. They can help the company solve consumer problems, answer some technical questions, and at the same time remind the company which consumers are posting unfavorable information about the company online.
Online Advertising:
- Test online advertising effects. All activities on the network 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 the effectiveness of online advertising.
Reduce product support costs:
- Effectively reduce the cost of manual responses to consumer product inquiries through FAQs, etc.
- Streamline employees. When customers get used 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 at any time through the network 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, so they may solve future problems themselves.
- 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 products should introduce relevant topics on the network.