Zero knowledge in internet marketing: Does that apply?
Internet Marketing! As an MBA majoring in marketing at Sauder school of Business, UBC, the reason for taking up this course was to understand to depth and width on how internet can support the marketing of any business. Very recently I started up a tourism consulting business in Vancouver but at a particular stage, the business was stalled because we couldn’t make an “effect” on the web and attract the crowd. We thought it is all about setting up a Facebook page; spread the news to the friends and colleagues to like the Facebook page. We got around 60 likes after much “push” among friends category. But that was it. Nothing happened after that. How it could have been done effectively?
Now a friend of mine, who is the founder director of a software services company based out of Victoria, wanted my help to do the business development for the firm. The company has a layer of software consultancy services and a new software product which is currently in the innovation phase. Well, I need to think about how could I use internet to market their service & product? May be testimonials, may be a short video of the product, and may be a Facebook page? But is that enough? IS my approach smart enough to catch people’s attention in this ever dwindling attention span of internet space?
After the first class of internet marketing, one thing was obvious. I wanted to search & see how the internet marketing is defined today. My search revealed some good insights; internet marketing has three different categories, web marketing, e-mail marketing & social media marketing. While the web marketing is aimed at internet, email marketing talks about marketing via emails and social media marketing is marketing via Facebook, twitter, YouTube etc.
After I did an initial research about it, here is what I found about some recent trends on digital marketing. The first one is location based marketing which makes use of GPS technology to market to the geographical location of the target market. The second one is diversification of social media as much as possible. Video marketing and video targeting are some other trends which is intended to get more customer attention in the ever-crowded digital world .In an essence, digital marketing can only succeed when it freely accommodates new technologies and approaches and, most importantly, puts the priority on user needs. This can be only achieved by making marketing messages smarter and simplistic.
Then I started to analyze some of the concepts I learned in class. May be the “attention in detail” to the various concepts I learn in class will help me to “connect points” and design a great digital marketing plan to market my tourism business and my friend’s software services and product business. Fingers crossed!