Internet Marketing information

Internet marketing is also known as web marketing, online marketing, or eMarketing, and is the marketing of products or services using the Internet.

The Internet has added many unique sales benefits to marketing, one of which is lower costs for the distribution of information and media to a truly worldwide audience. The interactive nature of Internet marketing, offering instant response and encouraging rapid responses, is unique to the medium.

Internet marketing is often considered to have a wider scope than traditional marketing because it includes digital media such as the Internet, email, web banner advertising etc. However, Internet marketing also includes gathering digital customer data and developing customer relationship management (CRM) systems.

Internet marketing brings together many of the creative and technical elements of the Internet, including design, development, visual creativity, advertising, and sales. Internet marketing does not simply cover building or promoting a website, nor does it simply mean placing a banner advertisement on a website.

Effective Internet marketing requires a comprehensive integrated marketing strategy that emphasises a company's business targets and sales goals with its website usage and appearance, focusing on its chosen target markets through the considered choice of advertising options, media, and design.

Internet marketing also means the carefully considered placement of media during the different stages of the customer engagement cycle, using methods such as search engine marketing (SEM), search engine optimisation (SEO), banner advertising, email marketing, and web strategies. 

The traditional Four Ps of marketing

In the 1960s, the Harvard Business School in the USA discovered a number of company actions that influence the decision to buy goods or services. They suggested that the actions are a “Marketing Mix”, containing four marketing elements: product, price, promotion and placement.

Product: The product aspects of marketing cover the specifications, and how they relate to the end-user's different needs and wants. The scope of a product normally includes supporting elements eg warranties, support and guarantees.

Pricing: This covers the process of setting the best and most effective price for a product, including discounts. The price does not necesarily need to be monetary - it can be what’s exchanged for the product or service - eg time, energy, or a measure of attention.

Promotion: This covers web advertising, sales promotion, traditional advertising, publicity, and face-to-face selling and branding, and refers to the various methods of sales promotion.

Placement (or distribution): covers how the product or service gets to the customer eg distribution or retailing. This fourth P is also called Place, referring to the different channels through which it is sold (eg online or retail etc), which region or industry and which market segment (eg teenagers, families, business people etc).

These four marketing elements are very often called the marketing mix, which can be used to create a marketing plan. The four Ps marketing model is very useful for B2B both products and services. High-value consumer products require some refinements to this model. Services marketing must also take account of the unique nature of the services.

B2B marketing must also take into account long-term agreements which are typically found in supply chain contracts. Relationship marketing also attempts to accomplish this by looking at all aspects of marketing from a long-term relationship-building angle rather than simply looking at individual transactions.