In the modern age of eCommerce and the internet everything; every marketer becomes an “internet marketer”.
But what does this really mean? Can traditional marketing methods and best practices be applied to online marketing? Will they be successful? It’s almost unanimous that eCommerce has changed the face of marketing methods forever, and today – we’re going to give a brief rundown of what you can do to succeed at marketing in an ever-changing online world.
The Information Age
Online Marketing Tips – The single greatest factor that has pushed traditional marketing methods to evolve is the sheer amount of information at customers’ fingertips in a modern world. While our 21st century lifestyle has been dubbed the “Information Age”, this has a unique way of affecting sales and marketing specifically. Prior to the mainstream use of the internet, companies controlled 99.99% of the information about their products, markets, and services.
This information could then be vastly manipulated, and only the keenest of shoppers were able to weed through things to get at the facts. This meant marketers didn’t have to work hard to prove things to customers – only to outshine the competition with “fun” and “shiny” sales pitches.
As more and more companies, and small businesses, began to sell things online – people began to shop faster and smarter than ever before. Not only could they compare prices and features in seconds, but thousands of online forums also sprung up to help rate products and services. Gone were the days when someone was “the only game in town” just because they literally were in town! The Information Age brought a swift end to what many would call “fake” marketing, and brought us into the current age of online marketing – where a specific set of methods and practices had to be developed to succeed.
Online Marketing Success
Online Solutions for your business whenever you have the chance to make a pitch to someone online, whether it be a banner ad, text ad, or email or online marketing campaign – you have to speak to unique solutions. Talking about generic and diluted terms like “quality” and “value” doesn’t hold much ground anymore, and claiming you’re “the best” regarding a feature that you’re not will be debunked in about two google searches. When you stop creating fluff sales pitches and start presenting unique solutions – that’s when you’re going to get people’s attention.
The internet is all about content. Even the ads are expected to appear as content, that may just exist because it was promoted for its position – but it’s not allowed to be a disgusting and gaudy sales pitch. Just look at google itself – does it allow anything but clean content based ads to appear on its site? Never. As an online marketer, you need to locate unique solutions in your product and highlight those to your customer. Even if you aren’t the only solution for this problem on the market, you’re still one of them – and you can probably promote that better than the competition.
Even if your product is something that can easily be commoditized, like business cards for example – you can still highlight the long term solution of working with your business. What unique service points do you have? If price is your benefit, how much cheaper are you than the competition? Unique solutions sell – tired pitches don’t. Define your solution, and take it to the web!