Promoting products

Promoting products on the Web is different from using mass media promotion or personal contact. Assume that you want to explain these differences to a person who is planning to open a Web site to sell their product. Describe the product/service you want to sell and compare and contrast the traditional selling approaches to a Web approach. For each of the approaches (mass media, personal contact, the Web), explain the advantages and disadvantages as they apply to the product/service you are trying to sell.

For any product or service that is supposed to be sold, there is a need to create its awareness among the people, particularly the target audience. To do so, different companies take on different approach such as television commercials, radio spots, handbills, bill boards, word of mouth, event marketing and so on; the list seems to be a never exhausting one. However, the particular approach chosen for a particular product or service depends on a number of factors such as the nature of product, concentration of its target audience within some geographical area, the amount of budget available etc.

Moreover, another important factor for deciding the marketing communication strategy is the kind of business model and where the company wants to target the user. This paper is therefore intended to explore various options for promotion of the products sold online. It would be done through comparing the marketing options for traditional business model (brick and mortar model) with the online business model (click model). The goal of any communication strategy is two dimensional. First one is to create the audience resonance and second to ensure strategic relevance.

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Audience resonance refers to making the promotion message the one that creates a wow-factor for the audience and make them go through it and imagine it. While, the strategic relevance means that it should be capable of achieving the desired purpose of the communication strategy. Keeping these two parameters in our mind as basic guideline for decision of a promotion strategy let us discuss the possibilities for the two models. When something is sold online, it is important that the promotion message reaches the audience when the audience is there online, on the internet.

Thus, for a website selling something online the most appropriate strategies would be:

Email marketing This is one of the simplest modes of marketing online which includes getting the email list and send e-mails to them about the product offerings with the URL of the website to the target audience. However, the most obvious problem attached with this is getting the email addresses of those who are really the target audience in terms of their demographics, behaviors, psychographics and geography. One way to do is add a subscription feature to the website.

But the pre-requisite for success of this strategy (subscription based email offerings) is the initial traffic at websites. • Google Ad Words Another option is to purchase Google ad words. This means that certain key words are booked by the website with Google. So when visitors searching those key words search them on Google search engine or those key words exists on its affiliate sites using Google Ad Sense, the ad of the website (sponsored link) will be displayed on those pages. This strategy is particularly successful if relevant key words are chosen and purchased.

Creating a involvement

This is a broader method that may have many aspects to it. The underlying idea is to get the people come to your website. Whatever, the reason for their coming, it would provide you with the opportunity to show case your products or services in front of them. In recent times, the most commonly used method is that of blogging.

Banner Ads on Social Networking Sites

One most rapidly emerging advertising mode for online marketing is that on social networking sites. Those who use such sites have given relevant demographic data to those sites and therefore, that can be leveraged for contextual marketing.

As we can see that these methods seem quite different from the traditional mass communication or direct marketing media. Mass communication has although many advantages for the traditional business models however it is not relevant for online websites selling something because in this model you need the people to come to your website and they could be convinced for that the best and most effectively when you do so through online medium.

Bibliography

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