The Changing Game Of Marketing Online

Introduction

The marketplace, along with its customers, is ever changing. The trend has changed from simply selling available products to customers who do not have many options to selling products that the customers seek and have a need for. The marketplace has become customer-oriented with the customers in the seat of power.

As the marketplace changes, so is there a need for change in marketing strategies. With a new brand of customers businessmen and marketers have to find new ways of selling their products and enticing the customers to buy them. This is especially true for traditional companies who are finding that there is no longer such great demand for their products. In the business world, as in the real world, being unable to adapt will mean the demise of the company.

Traditional and New Marketing

For marketers to adapt to the changing game of marketing online they first have to understand about the differences between traditional marketing and new marketing approaches. In Meryl Evans and Hank Stroll's article on Marketing Challenge: Traditional vs. New Marketing, they discussed two important differences between traditional and new marketing concepts; that is, the focus and the one in control. The two concepts are actually very much intertwined. According to Evans and Stroll "old marketing concept focuses on selling what is being produced, while new marketing concentrates on producing what can be sold or consumed." This means that nowadays the demand dictates the supply and not the other way around. Old marketing has worked for such a long time because people had no choice and there was neither time nor the means to produce things beyond what was needed. And when the time came when the means was there to produce things beyond needs companies dictated the trends because they had the money, the power, and the tools. However, control began to shift to the people or consumers as information became commoditized and became harder to please. Consumers nowadays have clear opinions of what their wants and needs are and cannot be as easily dictated as before. Control has shifted from companies to the customers. According to Alison Fraser, president of The Better Idea Inc., companies' focus should shift from trying to control consumers to trying to satisfy them.

With that in mind, companies need to create or supply new products and marketers need to find new ways to sell those products, always with the aim of pleasing the customer. It seems that the adage "The customer is always right." is what's new marketing is all about.

New Methods for Marketing Online

Although online marketing might still seem like a new strategy for some, the Internet and the Internet community is so vibrant that change is always around the corner. Since marketing first entered the Internet, online marketing has introduced new marketing methods and continues to do this in efforts to keep up with the fast evolving habits and needs of the Internet users.

Below are listed some of the relatively new techniques or methods, aside from the usual advertising techniques, used in Internet or online marketing.

1. Article marketing - Article marketing works by having business owners write a short article about an interesting facet of their business and having them submit their articles to free sites like eZine Article Authors and Search Warp. This "article sites" reads like a magazine and stores numerous articles in their database, which are categorized. Readers can then search for articles on different topics they want to read. The article, of course, contains the writer's name, an author's bio, and a link to the business' website. The business model sells not products but you as a good source of information. It sells your expertise. Good articles will surely establish your reputation and send droves of traffic to your website as they seek to find out more about you and your work.

2. Blogs - Blogs were not originally intended to be a marketing tool. However, the blogosphere has grown to such proportions and has become an important source of information in the Internet that marketers and advertisers saw opportunities in blogging and soon jumped the band wagon. Blogs instead of being created for purely personal reasons or to simply write and educate other people about one's passion are now being used as marketers as a promotional tool. Since anyone can maintain a blog marketers publish their own blogs with posts all related to the product or service they are pushing. Along with these promotional blogs, real bloggers are also cashing in on their blogs from advertisements they choose to carry like AdSense. Very popular blogs can make substantial amounts of cash by simply being an AdSense affiliate or by joining other affiliate programs and carrying ads for them.

3. Link Popularity and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - Search engines has become a vital part in Internet users' search for information. Internet users do not even memorize website URLs anymore, except for the really popular websites, but simply rely on search engines to get them where they want to go. Because of this the importance of ranking high and ending up in the front pages of search engine results pages (SERPs) have become vital for businesses. Being among the top results in Google or Yahoo's SERPs surely means a great number of traffic to your site and being absent from their SERPs almost always guarantees obscurity for your site. Even eBay, who is already known as the World's Online Marketplace still depends heavily on Google for their traffic with as much as 30% of their traffic coming from Google. Because of this SEO and link popularity has become very important since an optimized website and one that has high link popularity is going to help your website achieve a high rank and increase the chance of being on top of SERPs. SEO experts have therefore cropped up and responded to the need or demand giving a new service, which is very much in demand. New SEO directories have also started cropping up all over the Internet just when directories were about to become irrelevant. This is in response to the need for many sites to build their link popularity and since directories do help in that aspect they have gained popularity again as a part of most sites' marketing strategy. Websites are warned though to stay away from link farms, free-for-all link sites, and directories that do not screen joining websites since they could hurt instead of help your site's page rank.