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By seizing the online opportunity, companies can create exciting new marketing possibilities
Brent Heiggelke, VP of Marketing for WebTrends Web Analytics, NetIQ.
Many marketers have experimented with using the 4 Ps – product, price, place and promotion – on the Web. But few are really maximizing the experience and using it to its full advantage. Some don’t even agree that the 4 Ps can be fully transferred to an Internet environment. Most like to play it safe and simply create an online version of their offline catalogue and perhaps dabble in a bit of e-mail marketing.
However, the Web can be used as an effective tool that can both increase the scope and creativity of marketing efforts and reduce the financial risk involved. On the Internet, marketers can employ trial and error as a means of effectively determining the best possible approach to market, without the costs involved with a physical launch or making in-store campaign changes. This is compared to the offline environment, where making an error on product positioning, pricing, store location and promotional approach can quickly become a costly mistake. In a sense, your home page can become your virtual ‘test lab’, where visitors vote with their clicks, letting you know precisely what’s hot and what’s not, before you commit to expensive offline changes.
For a marketing department with a restrained budget, tweaking prices online, rather than rolling out incremental price changes across a network of stores, is certainly a more cost effective solution. Proctor and Gamble uses the Web to preview many of its new products and offerings to the market. By precisely determining customer interest and demand, it can streamline its product rollout by optimising the level of stock it feeds into the supply chain and ensuring the best possible pricing.
Those companies willing to fully embrace the Internet as a more effective and flexible marketing medium can raise the game to an even higher level. Take easyJet, which sells its low-cost flights through its Website and its call centre. It constantly tracks customer interest in its flights and makes continual incremental pricing alterations accordingly. As soon as the 18h30 flight on Friday night starts generating more interest, the price immediately starts climbing. And rather than chasing customers away, the constant price changes act as an incentive to its customers to return again and again to seek the best possible deal.
However, along with the flexibility and cost-cutting potential it delivers, the Web also brings with it a few unique challenges. The first is to ensure that your customers’ expectations are met – and exceeded – when they visit your site. The second is learning to operate within radically reduced timescales.
Practically all sites fit into one of four business models: online selling (Amazon); online lead generation, offline selling (BMW); online self-service or information (local Government); and ad-driven content sites (Fortune.com). What all these sites have in common is that they have determined what motivation their customers have for visiting their site and then ensured that those expectations are met. By carefully tracking online movements and actions, marketers can meet expectations and ensure that their site remains in touch with their customers.
The reduced window of time available for companies to react to market changes means Marketers today need to rapidly analyse information, make decisions and then convert them into action. Those who don’t act quickly enough to the constant shift in customer desires and demands will lose out to the competition that can.
By learning to exploit the Web’s ability to provide exact information for analysis, you can dramatically improve your marketing success.
Brent Heiggelke is Vice President of Marketing for WebTrends Web Analytics at NetIQ. Download his ‘Winning on the Web’, a free executive pocket guide to smarter marketing, from www.webtrends.com, to learn more about achieving Internet-based marketing success.
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