Back in 1986 I became
interested in marketing and advertising quite by
accident. I was employed by a major
communications company and teaching computer classes.
When a new product for analyzing the effectiveness of various
advertising campaigns was installed, I was expected to learn the
product and then teach the marketing gurus how to use
it. I was fascinated with demographics and how
campaigns were deployed. I considered changing my
career and going back to school but got side tracked with a
cross-country move. Let’s look at what I was
considering then compared to what the market looks like
now.
My company was spending
millions on advertising campaigns that were done on TV, in direct
mail, flyers on door handles, inserts into the monthly bill,
etc. All of these were the traditional form of
advertising in the 1980’s. From what I saw of
these advertising campaigns, there were more losers than there were
successes. However, when the successes are huge,
it masks the losses. Customers today are
more savvy and are just plain tired of all the junk mail whether it
paper or electronic.
Online marketing, also
called Internet Marketing, still uses demographics as well as
several other factors to target the consumer. A
major difference here can be in the dollar amount spent on these
campaigns. In the early 1990s many businesses
were creating commercial web sites that were simply online brochures
and product catalogues. Customers would check out
what they wanted but many were afraid to give credit card
information online so they just placed the call instead.
Because of the new encryption technology, customers feel more
confident with online purchases. The number of
internet users today is 1018 million or 15.7% of the world
population. Compare that to August of 2001 when
it was 513 million, 8.6% of the world population.
That means it almost doubled in just a little over 4
years! If you like statistics (and I do) consider
that
Sweden has the highest
percentage (73.6%) of their people on the internet and the
United
States is at
68.5%. If this does not get you excited about
online marketing, I’m not sure what would.
Online marketing has a
completely different set of tools it uses for marketing.
Search engine marketing, joint ventures, opt-in emails,
newsletters, etc. Each type of campaign can reach
a different type of prospective client depending on how you decide
to run the particular campaign. We will cover
each of these in detail in our next article.
Many of the pioneers of
online marketing who saw this potential are now exceedingly
wealthy. If you check online, you’ll see that
several of them are producing eBooks and eCourses that detail the
“secrets of internet success.” Quite often
these books and courses are distributed via download for
free. With this kind of information available,
there has never been a better time to start an online
business.
Here’s to
your future success.
Karen Kelley spent more
than 25 years in the communications business and is now building
profitable webs sites. For more information on this subject,
please visit these sites
Best Online Success or http://www.sitesell.com/webpartner5.html