When you're online, do you see ads for companies that seem to match your interests?
That's not always random. It's called behavioral targeting, and it means that advertisers know what sites you've visited and what related businesses you might be interested in seeing. They put relevant sites in front of you hoping to find customers likely to click on their businesses.
Marketing to an online audience can be much more precise than traditional marketing.
In addition to advertising, companies buy or gather lists of e-mail addresses and send e-mails to those people. Called e-mail blasts, if these messages are timely, such as the introduction of a product or a special promotion, customers will likely follow the link to your site to learn more.*
E-mail blasts are sent to a wide audience; however, messages can be more personalized, too. For example, if you sell wine, you can segment your customers so you send a special offer on red wine to those who have purchased red wine from you before.
There are other ways to personalize your message. Have you ever put items into a shopping cart online, then abandoned it without purchasing anything? This is common; maybe you're comparison shopping, or confused about how to make your purchase, or have security concerns. Companies can now identify people who leave the site and send them a special offer or reminder that they have items in their carts.**
If customers have purchased items, you can follow up with ideas for related items they may be interested purchasing in the future.
Other online marketing tools are search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimization (SEO).
The goal of SEM is to increase a company's visibility on search engine results pages by buying placement on those search engines; it's pay-per-click advertising that places the company under a sponsored section of search results.
For SEO, companies do not buy placement on a search engine; instead, targeted keywords are built into the design of a website to help that company appear near the top of the search engine results page. Tracking studies have shown that placement near the top of a page means that more people will click on your site. ***
The right strategy for your business depends on many things, and is something an Internet marketing consultant can help you determine.
Another way to market your business is to offer deals exclusive to online shoppers. Airlines and electronics stores often do this; it drives up business without increasing any overhead.
So how will you know your marketing strategies are working? Hopefully, business increases, but now there is analytics software that will track how the users got to your site (did they click on the offer in your e-mail, or did they come to your website another way?), where they click around once they arrive, and when they leave the site. Hopefully, they've purchased something before they go. If not, you can see where they dropped off and follow up to try to bring them back to your site. Identifying patterns and seeing which offers and promotions increased business may provide insight into how to improve aspects of your site so customers are likely to buy more next time.
* http://www.ecommercetimes.com
** http://www.tamingthebeast.net/
*** http://en.wikipedia.org/
