This video from Youtube is about social marketing strategies and how you can use the power of Facebook, Twitter and all those other social networks to drive people to your blog. Perry Belcher also explains why making friends is so important in today’s online business world.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=zn1cspHx7DU

Online stores can be a difficult place for consumers, as they are easily overwhelmed by real time updates, multiple decision criteria, and the presence of various alternatives in a given online store. This is the summary of a paper by Muhammed T. Nuseir, et al., which looks for factors that influence the decisions that consumers make when they are shopping online. You can get the pdf of the behavioral targeting article here: Evidence of Online Shopping: A Consumer Perspective.

There have been studies that investigated what determines behavior during online shopping, and these determinants boil down to three broad factors: trust, customer characteristics, and online vendor characteristics.

Consumer Characteristics

Consumers are defined by demographic profiles based on age, gender, occupational status, income levels, education level, country of residence , marital status and attitudes. These largely influence a consumer’s decision to purchase online or not. According to several studies, online consumers tend to seek for convenience, variety, and they are not as conscious about the price and brand. Online consumers also favor direct marketing and advertising. Furthermore, gender is a factor in terms of what consumers are interested in buying.

Product Characteristics

Product characteristics include merchandise quality, or how consumers perceive the quality of the merchandise. It has a significant effect on how a consumer’s decision to purchase a product or not, aside from other factors such as internet distribution, transaction and communication.

Security

Security has a lot of meaning; it can mean being anonymous, retaining privacy, controlling personal information, and expecting to be confidential. It is an important factor, and many use it as a gauge for online venture success. Customers in general feel that their personal data is safe, and that their transactions are secure.

Promotion

Promotion ensures that customers know what products or services a business is selling. This factor can influence how much of the product a consumer buys and when the consumer buys that product. It will continue to play an important role, as the rapid development of the Internet increases interest for creating promotions that are very customer-responsive. There are three categories for promotion, push or email promotion, third party promotion, and retail website promotion.

Contributions of this Paper

The results in this paper show that the following factors have a relationship with a consumer’s purchase decisions, based on data collected from 181 online consumers and an evaluation of their demographic profiles. These factors are Internet security, Internet infrastructure, service or product characteristics, e-promotions and e-price. E-price is defined as a consumer’s cost of perceived value, supply chain efficiency, product or service cost, and cost of time and search for product.

This is the summary of an article by Matthew Brown, written on 2003, which is an analysis of online marketing in the sports industry. This industry needs a very good understanding of how marketing through the Internet works. You can get the pdf of the behavioral targeting here: An Analysis of Online Marketing in the Sports Industry: User Activity, Communication Objectives, and Perceived Benefits.

In the United States, the sports industry is a very large industry, and its players are looking for ways to further increase its GDP worth. Therefore marketers are looking for new methods of gaining even more revenue, and since the advent of the television, and the television advertising industry, the Internet is the most promising technology. This is primarily because of its rapid growth compared to other electronic technologies and forms of communication. Because of the vast number of people using the Internet, it certainly is a legitimate form of mass media. This fact alone makes it a great tool for doing business.

Factors that Discourage Online Marketing

However, some organizations are a bit hesitant to invest in online marketing. There are several reasons for this. One reason is that firms believe there is a lack of profitability in this investment. Having an online business has a high fixed cost, and even a small revenue decline can result to financial loss. Advertising revenue in the Internet may not also be enough to cover the expenses of setting up the online business. Furthermore, many organizations feel that consumers are not yet used to online shopping, and they find it confusing sometimes. Aside from this, they are also concerned about privacy, and are hesitant to share personal information to the shopping website to purchase goods, including credit card information.

While these factors discourage some companies from setting up online marketing websites, ESPN is not one of those companies. In fact, they already have a solid presence in the online marketing industry. Sports organizations in general have all the right reasons behind tapping the Internet for revenue. This is because of the close resemblance between the demographic of online users and sports fans of all the major sports leagues in the US: 18 to 34 year old males. Furthermore, a large portion of online users have already used the Internet to gather information about the latest sports updates. There’s a good chance, if sports marketers do it properly, for the Internet to be a good marketing tool for the sports industry.

Unique Study

As of the year that this article has been written, there has been no study about the role that online marketing can provide for the industry of sports marketing. Most of the information has been about how to build a successful sports website. Still, the advantage of online marketing is that it offers a unique two way communication between buyer and seller, that’s because the consumer doesn’t have to go far to communicate directly with the business. In turn, the business can get a lot more feedback and further improve their products or services. Thus, online marketing can be very advantageous. Not only that, online marketing can transform prospective buyers into interactive customers, a fact that is not fully realized and exploited by most companies.

Main Questions

This study attempts to answer three questions. First, what is the profile of website user activity in the industry? Second, what are the most important marketing communication objectives of website owners? Third, what are the perceived benefits of establishing a website? This is done through a survey sent out to a sample of 750 sports organizations found in Sports Market Place. The Sports industry has three segments, performance, production and promotion, and this study focuses on the busiest of the three in terms of Internet marketing activity, and that is performance.

The survey questionnaire used in the study is designed to determine the usage characteristics of the sports industry websites. To determine which is the most important marketing objectives, forced ranking was implemented per objective. Ratings are ordinal numbers representing extremely important to extremely unimportant. Content validation was done through careful analysis, making sure that there is an acceptable level of representation, and studying of related web literature. Furthermore, a pilot study was made, which confirmed the reliability of the survey questionnaire.

Profile of Website User Activity

Results answered the three key questions of this study. For the first question, what is the profile of website user activity in the industry? It has been shown that 61 percent of the organizations monitored site hits, 35 percent monitored site visit, and 21 percent monitored page views. The organizations that didn’t report hits on either of the three categories almost always didn’t monitor or track this kind of information, which just hurts their capacity to reach top potential when selling online advertising rates. Of the three, page views are found to be the best way to measure advertising rates with accuracy.

Marketing Communication Objectives

The second question is, what are the most important marketing communication objectives of website owners? The answer to this question, according to the survey results, is providing information about the organization to visitors. Second is generating awareness of organization. In third place is projecting favorable organization image. It is well-worth noting the two least important marketing communication objectives, because they seem to indicate the rise of e-commerce. These are, selling organizational merchandise or tickets, and generating leads for salespeople.

Perceived Benefits

Finally, the last question is what are the perceived benefits of establishing a website? The top answer to this question is reaching a desirable demographic, but it only scored 5.22 on a Likert scale, with 7 being extremely important. Next is establishing customer loyalty, then reaching a global market, and creating brand positioning. What is surprising is that the least important benefit was accessing online purchasers. As a conclusion, the researcher feels that many sports organizations are missing the benefits of having an interactive marketing tool. Most of the organizations have websites that are merely the electronic versions of their press releases, etc.

A good recommendation is for sports organizations, aside from the collegiate and professional sports teams that have already been doing it, to prioritize selling tickets and merchandise on the Internet. This method of buying already has great potential, and in the future, a large percentage of tickets will already be sold online.

Relationship marketing is important for the sustainability of your business, and with the potential and capabilities of the Internet, it is viewed either as the best or the worst way of interacting with your customers. The internet is a great technology for gathering data about your consumers and determining what they want and develop a good relationship with them. However, this same technology can get consumers to be concerned about their privacy. This is the summary of an article by Mark Brown and Rose Muchira. You can get the pdf of the behavioral targeting article here: Investigating the relationship between Internet Privacy Concerns and Online Purchasing Behavior.

It is important to collect data about your consumers, but it’s more important to use this data and not draw any concern from them. In fact, 10 percent of people who fill up online registration forms don’t give information about themselves. Whenever building relationships is involved, trust is very important, and that’s why they don’t give away information right away. One partner has trust for another when there is confidence in integrity and reliability. Privacy concerns are an issue for consumers if there is no trust.

Aside from trust, relationship also thrives with confidentiality. After trust, a consumer expects that their information is used ethically and kept confiedentially. Furthermore, it has been shown through research that consumers are more concerned about their information if used in other means than they are when it is used for relationship marketing.

Internet Privacy

When it comes to relationship marketing, the Internet comes full equipped with its capabilities of gathering data, and as such it has privacy implications at hand for consumers. Also, the internet has several tools which are valuable for consumers, such as being a customer support tool, a channel for distribution, sales, and a source for retrieving information.

Compared to other marketing channels, the internet is different in that it doesn’t have a control mechanism that is centralized, its communication and information processes are globalized, and data collection and creation is increased. All of these give the Internet an edge in obtaining consumer data as potential market information, and creating databases of consumer profiles that can be used by authorities and companies as well.

The fact that companies know a lot about these consumers heighten the concern among a significant portion of the population towards online privacy. Privacy ethics is very important; it is indeed a moral right and people should not allow their privacies to be invaded without permission. Those who sell products online should not use personal information from consumers without their consent.

Unauthorized Secondary Use of Data

Personal information has become a commodity. It is now being traded, sold and bought, and the importance of profiting has exceeded privacy, perhaps because it is now so easy to collect and link vast amounts of this commodity. Still, personally identifiable information is still very valuable for online users in terms of confidentiality, and one main concern for them is whether this information will have secondary use for companies, etc.

Companies can gain trust from their customers if they display privacy policies, and if they don’t, that can make them anxious about where their information is going or how it is being used. In fact, studies show that a significant number of users use false information for privacy protection.

Invasion of Privacy

When customers are concerned about their privacy, the strongest move that they can do is not buy from the goods a company is selling. This is especially true if an invasion of privacy occurs. Invasion can happen when a business contacts a customer several times even if the customer didn’t request it. This article hypothesizes that there is a significant negative relationship between a consumer’s the purchasing of goods through the Internet and ones privacy invasion experience online.

Research Discussion

Surprisingly, the results of this article shows that there is no significant relationship between unauthorized secondary use of data and the purchasing behavior of online consumers. This implies that consumer’s are not as concerned about secondary use as expected. But this can also be due to the fact that the respondents of the survey used in this study are mostly young people, who are less concerned about privacy.

Another result suggest that indeed, when there is invasion of privacy, consumers are less likely to purchase products from an online business. Businesses should therefore carefully choose their communications, e.g. avoid spamming emails. Permission marketing should be put to practice.

Another result shows that there is a significant relationship between a consumer’s decision to purchase online, and his or her experience in the past. Specifically, that experience wherein the personal data he sent out was used or altered against his consent. However, generally, consumers are okay about their privacy being not put into consideration, if they can really benefit from doing so.

The internet has a lot of potential as a commercial medium. However, managers still don’t have the measuring tool to figure out if Internet marketing will work for their benefits. They have to risk investing on internet marketing and possibly even compromise their other offline marketing methods. This paper, which suggests that the Internet be used like a store front, where goods and services sold online are given directly to the consumers, is written by Melody Kiang, T.S. Raghu and Kevin Huei-Min Shang. You can get the pdf of the behavioral targeting here: Marketing on the Internet – who can benefit from an Online Marketing Approach?

It is very important for managers to decide which marketing channel they will use. Marketing channels can be divided into two categories: indirect marketing and direct marketing. Some managers choose indirect marketing because they don’t have the money to pursue direct marketing, they want to focus on the core business, and sometimes using direct marketing can lower cost-effectiveness. Choosing the right channel can be determined by investigating various factors, and since internet marketing has the same characteristics as other channels despite being relatively new, these factors can be used for evaluation as well.

Importance of Internet Marketing

There are several benefits of internet marketing based on three channels. First, as a communication channel. Internet marketing in this regard has the edge of interactivity compared to other channels. It also helps build relationships and organizes, communicates and gives access to information. As a transaction channel, internet marketing gives your business an edge in visibility and allows you to reach more base customers. It can also give you a great ability to customize sales and promotion. As a distribution channel, operating and commission costs are reduced, and avoid such costs as space rental, among others. These are just a few of the advantages of internet marketing discussed in the paper.

Aside from the traditional factors that are used to assess which channel to choose for internet marketing, four new factors should be considered. These four factors are ease of value addition to the product, order complexity, specialty of goods, and convenient location. Examples of factors that are traditionally included for all other forms of marketing include the following: logistics, after-sales service, and product quality assurance.

Internet Products/Services Classification

The products and services that are sold in the Internet vary tremendously, but they can be classified into search goods and experience goods. For search goods, only external information is needed to evaluate them properly, whereas personal evaluation is needed for experience goods. Search goods are more ideal for Internet marketing. Furthermore, these goods can also be classified into three dimensions. Cost and frequency purchase, degree of differentiation and value proposition.

This study proposes another dimension in the mix, and that is transaction complexity. This is especially important for e-businesses, in determining whether the product or service is good for Internet marketing. In fact, the Internet can do a lot in making a transaction easier. Just think about all the time it can save in processing, and the risks of human error is lessened.

Conclusion

Businesses should consider using Internet marketing to stay competitive. It allows businesses to directly contact consumers. However, businesses should be careful, and use product or service characteristics to determine if direct sales through Internet marketing is right for them. This study has shown the important factors that can determine a good’s adaptability to marketing online.

Online advertising has become a very profitable endeavor for publishers in the Interent. Its growth can be attributed to the rise in popularity of Google’s advertising method through search, and in fact, this industry will continue to rise annually by 12 percent in the coming 5 years. 2008 saw 23.4 billion dollars in overall sales in online advertising. This is the summary of a behavioral targeting article by Jonathan Levin and Paul Milgrom. You can get the pdf of the behavioral targeting article here: Online Advertising: Heterogeneity and Conflation in Market Design.

Online advertising is different from traditional advertising, because it aims to send advertisements to a particular group of people with the same characteristics., in a more thorough manner. To some extent, traditional ads can do that as well, but in very limited capabilities. Search advertising allows one to know exactly what a user wants right away through the keywords one types in a search box. The measurement and targeting capabilities of search advertising makes it highly effective for advertisers and convenient for online users.

Further information can be obtained from a user’s history of searches so that his or her interests can be determined. Clicks on ads can even measure how effective ads are to provide some refinement in the future. Surely, in the future, ads will become more and more targeted and impressions becoming more distinct. But there are disadvantages to having excessively targeted ads, and so the importance of inflation comes into play.

Commodity and Conflation

Commodity is anything that is relevant to a buyer, and the date and location which it will be available. However, this is an incomplete definition because this implies that no two objects are the same commodity, no matter how small the difference is. But in fact, commodities can vary in many characteristics. For example, wheat can vary in terms of weight, cleanliness and composition. If each commodity were sold separately for all its unique characteristics, then this method becomes a very difficult transaction.

One solution for this is standardization. It has a lot of benefits, including reducing measurement costs and selection processes. However, this can also go wrong because grade requirements can mix up and the responsibility of classifying commodities are left in the hands of a few experts.

A better solution would be a sort of toss up between the two. For example, selling diamonds starts with an auction categorizing diamonds into 19 categories, called deals, and each deal is further divided into splits. For each deal, a seller builds a common price through conflation. But while the auction sets a common price, split prices are then adjusted using a precise process where close examination is done only per split, and measurement costs are reduced.

Online Advertising Conflation

Conflation exists in search advertising in the following manner. Bidders have a lot of control as to the keyword they want to bid for, the price per click, and the text ad to be displayed. However, there is conflation in other variables, such as coarse control over keyword match leeway, price variation in page positions, demographics, or by the cookies that describe a user’s browsing behavior. Still, there are price adjustments for click rates depending on quality of the match, among others.

Three-Way Trade-Off

When there is excessive fine targeting, two problems arise. First is cherry-picking among knowledgeable advertisers, and second is the thin market problem. This paper suggest that three major effects need to trade off to have an efficient marketing design. First, finer targeting is a requirement since it prevents irrelevant ads. Second, excessively fine targeting may make safe participation in the market costly, and third, excessively fine targeting may cause monetization problems.

We don’t know yet what will happen to online display advertising in the future. Will the targeting become finer? But this article shows that auctions based on very specific impressions may have costs that are very unfavorable to bot the online publishing and advertising sector.

The approach is becoming more and more personal when it comes to marketing these days. The personal information gathered from sites are valuable asset to a company so that it can conduct effective advertisements. People leave information as accurate as log-in time, frequency, e-mail address, purchases made, telephone number and complete address. The question is, “how can this information be useful tools for future marketing”?

The need for revolutionized marketing is conspicuous as millions and millions of dollars are used every year for promotion, and better ROI (Return of Investment) is needed to compensate for the efforts. The use of individualized marketing makes sense as the behavior of the individual is taken into account in advertisement which will likely be converted into sales.

Let’s be realistic; spending money for advertisements that are aimed for “everyone” will account only for meager returns and compromise a lot investments. Therefore, it is not a good business decision. Timing is always important for any advertisement. The ultimate goal is to present the products to people when they need them and where they need them. There can be no other better way than knowing the individual’s needs through behavioral targeting.

Using this technique for marketing can help your business grow. For example, you are selling men’s basketball shoes. With the information you have, you can select who to send advertisements to base on their age, sex and purchases. People who also purchase basketball jerseys are likely to buy basketball shoes as well. Furthermore, you can specify the color and design of the products you advertise, and this will marvel your customers because your products are very accurate to their preferences.

To become useful information, the gathered data should be used the right way and used for delightful advertisements that will tickle the interest of the individual. The use of the information gathered is crucial in building a market for it and maintaining the old user while gaining others by minimized effort. The use of the information for correct marketing purpose can be translated to end user sales.

However, there are instances when behavioral strategy is not applicable. For example, if you happen to be selling Ferrari cars in your website, it does not necessarily mean that when someone enters your site, he or she will readily buy a car or has plans of buying it.

Another downside to behavioral marketing is that there are people who may become a user but requires advertisements for the product to come in their conception, thus prevents the broadening of user horizon. The opposition of people due privacy is also one thing that keeps behavioral marketing at the gates; true, information are being gathered for the purpose of marketing, but being cynical and all kills the spirit of it.

The demand for effective marketing strategy is now a battle down to every single user and behavioral strategy may answer the call.

Behavioral marketing is the science of studying consumers actions in order to determine what products, topics, or conditions influence their decision to purchase a new product. In short, it is way to present a consumer with conditions that will make a new purchase possible certain, which is why it is a study of psychology and behavioral patterns. For online companies it often includes studying browser habits of potential consumes to discover what makes them buy and what their buying tendencies are. A great example of behavioral marketing is selling popular related items next to a news story that viewers of the story will find interesting enough to click over to.

This information can be very useful to those who wish to save money and time while marketing their products. That is because the aim of behavioral marketing is to search out and find your target audience so that your marketing efforts hit the people who are most likely to purchase your product. You can spend time waiting for your target audience to find you, or you can simply take some efforts to find them. This is because once you know how your consumers shop you know exactly how to advertise where they can see you.

By now you may be wonder what behavioral marketing is, well the truth is that the easiest way to practice behavioral marketing is to hire a consultant team. Online it can be as simple as tracing and watching your customers browsing habits. You have probably already noticed large websites such as Amazon that offer you lists such as their popular customers who bought this also bought X.

This is an example of behavioral marketing in which Amazon takes its data to market additional purchases to customers while they browse. Amazon also utilizes a clever trick when they take their behavioral marketing to the next level and offer higher priced but appealing combination deals to get you to purchase two products instead of just one.

So how can you use behavioral marketing? If you are a large company you probably have an extensive list of product data and sales that you can utilize to figure out what your customers want, which is a good reflection of what your target audience wants overall. However, smaller companies may not have as large of a data collection in which case hiring companies such as Google Adsense, Facebook ads, or other marketing companies that will place your marketing efforts in the correct place for you using behavioral marketing techniques.

With the proper utilization of your data or of behavioral marketing companies you can increase your sales without spending an immense amount of money. And if the current internet landscape is a proper indication of the future, behavioral marketing is simply going to become more vital as time passes. Therefore, it is beneficial for you to jump on board now, or risk falling behind in the competitive landscape of the Internet.

Richard Branson & Seth Godin video interview

This is a video of an interview by Seth Godin with Richard Branson. Both are known in the marketing world as very successful and innovative thinkers. The main topic of the interview deals with “the crisis in business marketing”.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=dk2AO67dn3w

Businesses can choose between two basic paths. They can choose to create products or services that are common to every customer, or they can choose to make a market segment of one. That is, they can choose to create a firm which tends to the needs of every unique individual. This is the summary of an article written by Andreas Birnik and Richard Moat. You can get the pdf of the behavioral targeting here: Segmenting When it Matters

In theory, the second option has a lot of promise. However, if a firm has a huge market, then this option becomes impractical. A firm can sometimes be led to chaos when one of its members insists on a more refined segmentation. The greatest risk occurs when a company that is used to elementary segmentation resorts to a more refined one. These moves may be unnecessary, so that customers don’t really need to be segmented, and the association becomes more important than the customer.

Segment Range

Segment range is the extent of segment differentiation; how many unique customer segments is targeted by the firm. There are several segment positioning options that a firm can implement. We have the portfolio strategy with full segment differentiation, the portfolio strategy with varying segment differentiation, the niche strategy with maximum differentiation for one segment, the non-segmented mass market strategy, core offering across segments with deep segment differentiation, and the core offering across segments with some segment specific differentiation.

When segmentation is used, A firm should focus on segmenting activities that satisfy customers and simplify business operations. To do this, businesses should know what customers in a specific segment really want. You can do this through what is called the “strategy canvas” by Renee Mauborgne and W. Chan Kim. The basic idea is to know the segmenting of your competitors, to know which competing factors you should remove and which are most significant.

Segmentation Risks

Segmentation can swing like a pendulum in both ways. First, if a firm decides to develop propositions to include new segments, the pendulum may swing towards an unnecessarily large number of segments. Segmentation becomes more granular than is required by the consumer needs, and operational complexity increases. Furthermore, propositions may swing the other way and become too general. Standardization and customization should achieve balance.

Segment Activity Grid

Andreas Birnik and Richard Moat introduce the segment activity grid which allows managers to view activities in their firms from a segment level. This way, they can get rid of all business complexities which are unnecessary.

This grid is found to be very useful to view the degree of a businesses’ complexity. It can also be very valuable for firms that are preparing their launch, helping managers design the operating model which includes operational complexity and segment differentiation. To learn more about this segment activity grid, click on the link provided in the first paragraph.