Category Archives: E-Marketing

With boxing day coming soon, you find your sitting in front of your computer with blanket then lining up in front of Best Buy this winter. Holiday shoppers continued to show surprising interest in purchasing their gifts online with a surprising 10% increase in people planning to buy things online.

Shoppers mainly look online to compare prices a lot more quicker than running around town to search for deals but also to easily compare prices with Amazon and other retailers. The online aspect make it easy for certain products like durable goods and the easy transaction allows consumers to spend their boxing day in their warm home while still getting all that they desire. A surprising number of people are also looking for online reservations for products that can be picked up later. Retailers see potential to producing sales to not over load their cash register on the day of boxing day. This allows them to expand the number of sales they can process while also still meeting the demand of shopper that line up. It also pressures retailers to engage in more price competitive schemes online and gauge accordingly.

Forrester Research constantly updates an ongoing research project that defines users on the basis of their  involvement and have curiously defined a set of roles that all online users can be categorized into.

• Creators: As highlighted earlier, this crowd has become increasing ideal targets for many business hoping to expand their e-presence throughout the country. They are loved for the fact they generate free publicity and are large influential power
• Conversationalists: People that generally talk or discuss and voice their opinion to other customers and business. They are a vocal crowd so companies must be well prepared to handle this crowd of people
• Critics: Most people refer to these people as critics. They generally review items and post their opinions. They are well regarded usually because they focus on a specific product or element.
• Collectors: RSS feeds and newsletter are quite enticing to this crowd. They enjoy collecting and sharing all forms of data as well as participating and voting for things.
• Joiners: Similar to how social media works, these people may also be conversationalists at time and play an important role in developing a community and exerting pressure for other to join.
• Spectators: People who watch, read and listen from the sidelines. They rarely participate much or offer opinion.
• Inactives: Not involved in social media at all

Why: So why is this discovery so important? Well it conceptualizes the behaviour of the potential online market. It allows business to evaluate and target certain crowds on the basis of their involvement and also may make they encourage other to grow higher in their involvement.

The future of Technographics: While research is ongoing, there are important questions about how people can flip between these roles for example how joiners can become conversationalists. Business are indeed keen on actively finding ways to enhance their brand by creating more user generated content. Perhaps there is a loop mechanism in terms of how involvement increases and decreases from certain experiences. Technographics have the potential to create a lot of impact in the future.

Building relationships with social influencers is hard and tricky as it is neccessary to sound genuine in order to really build a relationship. Often times businesses put themselves in a precarious position when they believe they can buy influence like any other channel. However there a couple business can do to foster good business.

1. Connect with their social media platforms to start an initial contact – see what they like and what they post. Its important to get to know the social influencer you are targeting

2. Help promote their events that they are involved in

3.Share your own opinions to their content and ask for their expertise

4. Be helpful and try to develop a two way relationship by introducing influencers to other

5. Provide them with some exclusivity rather than monetary gains. If you want them to get an early peak at a new food item or something

Search in the online industry of e-marketing has grown significantly over the past decade and is almost a necessary consideration in an strategy designed to improve a companies online presence.

How they work:
the most familiar way of search is Google but all search engines are built with similar ingredients. They typically first involve “web crawling” which is a series of spiders that follow every link possible on the site. The second step involves Indexing where the web crawler determines where to store the information under a which tag keyword. The third step involves searching which is identified by keywords that the user would type in.

What is an SEO and SEM:
SEO: Search engine optimization is involved with improving you relevancy in the search engine through page tittles, meta tags and headings so that users can see your site higher up on the scale.
SEM: Search engine Marketing build links to connect your site with third party sites to improve traffic.

The blog is finally up and running! Hopefully, I’ll be digging up some great insight from fellow e-Marketing students. Stay tuned.