physical reminder in the office can be helpful. Examples, usually delivered through direct
marketing, include brochures, catalogues, business cards, point-of-sale material, pens,
postcards, inserts in magazines and password reminders for extranets.Word of mouth
It is worth remembering that, in addition to the methods above, word of mouth plays
an important role in promoting sites, particularly consumer sites, where the Internet is
currently a novelty. Opinion Research Corporation International, ORCI, reported on a
study amongst US consumers that showed that the typical Internet consumer tells 12
other people about his or her online shopping experience. This compares with the aver-
age US consumer, who tells 8.6 additional people about a favourite film and another 6.1
people about a favourite restaurant! It has been said that if the online experience is
favourable a customer will tell 12 people, but if it is bad, they will tell twice as many, so
word of mouth can be negative also. Parry (1998) reported that for European users, word
of mouth through friends, relatives and colleagues was the most important method by
which users found out about web sites, being slightly more important than search
engines and directories or links from other sites.
Thus the role of opinion leaders and multi-step communications with target audi-
ences receiving information about the Internet experience from opinion leaders, the
mass media and the Internet, appear to be perhaps even more important in relation to
the Internet than for other media. Dichter (1966) summarised how word-of-mouth com-
munications work. To exploit such communications, it is necessary for marketers to use
appropiate techniques to target and adapt the message for the opinion leaders when a
product or service is at an early stage of diffusion (Rogers, 1983). Viral marketing (see
later) will often target these opinion leaders to become advocates in initial contacts.In this section we will review approaches to online promotion using the different tools of
Figure 8.1 from 1 to 6, including search engine marketing, online advertisements, e-mail
and other methods of generating visitors to a web site. These techniques are often com-
bined in what is known as a ‘traffic-building campaign’; this is a method of increasing the
audience of a site using different online (and offline) techniques. The relative importance
of the online promotion techniques we will review in this section are indicated by Figure
8.13 (BrandNewWorld, 2004).Search engines are vital for generating quality visitors to a web site as suggested by
Figure 8.13. But being registered in the search engines is not enough. The importance of
effective search engine marketing is suggested by Figure 8.14 which shows that the
higher the rank of a company and products in the search engine results pages (SERPs)
the more visitors will be received. It is widely thought that it is essential to be in the top1 Search engine marketing
Online promotion techniques
Traffic-building
campaign
The use of online and
offline promotion
techniques such as
banner advertising,
search engine
promotion and
reciprocal linking to
increase the audience
of a site (both new and
existing customers.
1 Search engine marketing