Introduction
A company that has developed a great online customer experience as discussed in Chapter
7 is only part-way to achieving successful Internet marketing outcomes. In the days of the
dot-com boom a common expression was: ‘If you build it, they will come’. This famous line
proved true of a baseball stadium built in the 1989 film Field of Dreams, but unfortunately,
it doesn't apply to web sites. Berthon et al. (1998) make the analogy with a trade fair. Here,
there will be many companies at different stands promoting their products and services.
Effective promotion and achieving visibility of the stand is necessary to attract some of the
many show visitors to that stand. Similarly, if you want to maximise quality visitors
within a target audience to a web site to acquire new customers online, Internet marketers
have to select the appropriate online and offline marketing communications techniques
which are summarised in Figure 8.1 and form the core of this chapter. This is a major chal-
lenge since there are tens of millions of web sites with many pages, each vying to attract
an audience – Google indexes over 20 billion pages.Before reviewing the principles and success factors in deploying the communications
tools shown in Figure 8.1 we start by considering the unique characteristics of digital
media which we must apply for success and look at approaches for setting objectives for
and tracking the success of interactive communications.
The three main objectives and tactics of developing an interactive marketing commu-
nications programme for Internet marketing are to:Introduction
Figure 8.1 Options available in the communications mix for increasing visitors to a web
siteWeb site
and partner
microsites2 Online PR- Media alerting services
- Portal representation
- Blogs and RSS
- Community C2C posts
3 Online partnerships- Link-building
- Affiliate marketing
- Sponsorship
- Co-branding
1 Search marketing- Search engine
optimisation (SEO) - Pay Per Click (PPC)
- Trusted feed
5 Opt-in e-mail- Cold (rented list)
- Co-branded e-mail
- 3rd-party e-newsletters
- House list e-mails
6 Viral marketing- Pass-along e-mails
- Prompted e-mail a friend
- Incentivised
- Media mentions
4 Interactive ads- Display ads/banners
- Rich-media
- Dynamic/behavioural
- Sponsorship
Online communicationsOffline communications- Direct mail
- Exhibitions
- Merchandising
- Packing
- Word-of-mouth
Offline communications- Advertising
- Personal selling
- Sales promotion
- PR
- Sponsorship
Offline communications