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Articles
& Studies
Internet Marketing |
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| Developing Your Online Strategy |
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| Reading articles on Internet marketing is a
valuable learning exercise. One of the first places to look is the customer
feedback section on the sites of your competitors and on online industry
discussion groups and forums - what are people saying about the goods and
services of your competitors? Where have they gone wrong? Don't repeat their
mistakes. |
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| The trick to a good Internet marketing case study
analysis is to be able to apply what you have learned to your own
business. |
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| When the vehicle company Ford was looking to
boost sales of a transit van Connect in recent years, they found out that
search engines were letting them down. The word 'transit', even though it was a
term that technically only described their own vans, had fallen into the common
vernacular, and so their site wasn't coming out on top when Internet users
typed 'transit' into a search engine. A campaign that focussed on search engine
optimisation soon helped them up the rankings. |
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| Wool merchant
Awesome Ewe is another interesting
case. It traded online by selling wool to its customers, and the company
supplemented their first tentative steps into ecommerce with heavy direct
emailouts and special offers to their customers. The company's products doubled
year on year from 1999 to 2004 as it did this and also addressed the needs,
questions and concerns from their customers. |
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| Online bookseller Amazon.com is a good example of
how establishing a strategic partnership - often with a 'real life' commercial
venture - can help your product. In 2000 and 2001 reports showed that
Amazon.com had lost around 80 per cent of its share value since its launch. Its
share value recovered when news broke that it was planning a strategic
partnership with Wal-Mart. a chain big enough for shareholders to regain
confidence in the company. This is a case study to learn from: are their any
companies you can team up with that could help your cause, or open your product
up to a wider audience, that doesn't count itself as a competitor? |
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| Finally: putting appropriate key words into a
search engine will give you an insight into someone else's experience. Try to
find out - where did they spend their money? What worked for them and why? What
didn't work and why? The American Marketing Association -
www.marketingpower.com - is also a useful source of industry information. The
Direct Marketing Association www.the-dma.org also lists hundreds of services -
including Internet marketing companies. |
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| Background: |
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| Len Stalker has had the good fortune of being
involved with many successful projects including Online Advertising for a Major
Credit Union, the Online Promotion of a Wall Street Journal / New York Times
Best Seller and the Online Promotion of several Charitable Organizations and
many Commercial Ventures (including retail and real estate). |
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| The ShopSmart Group now includes:
ShopSmart Online - Building Your
Business Online Merchant Services & More ,
Awesome Ewe - The Internet's Biggest
& Most Awesome Knitting Superstore , Save On Yarn - Brand Name Yarns &
Patterns 20% - 60% Savings and Knit
Purls - Knitting & Crochet Magazine What's NEW & FREE
Patterns. |
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