Marketing Moves On The Internet

Companies are having to think out new marketing strategies in the modern era of the Internet. The way data is collected and analysed is also changing.

There are two general categories of market research information, as discussed here.

Primary data

This is data collected by the firm itself. Its purpose is to investigate a particular issue or solve a specific problem. The way the data is gathered might be by survey, or by observation, or even by an experiment.

With the Internet this information can be collected in new ways. Surveys can now be carried out online, and there are companies who help to create surveys and link them to hosting websites.

Primary data collected in this way can be either quantitative or qualitative.

Quantitative data comes from structured questions which the respondent replies to by giving a reply, for example, from 1 to 5. With these type of responses the data can be used to come up with percentages, averages and similar statistics. Survey creation websites enable users to create their own online surveys - a service that generates and tabulates quantitative data. The data can be viewed via the service provider's website to give instant, real-time analysis of the responses. This makes it a great tool with fast, useable data. Remember high street, mailed or telephone surveys? They just can't compete in terms of speed of response!

Qualitative data differs in that it tends towards longer answers and discussions. These come from open-ended questions which may, for example, be asked in focus groups. Companies use data within discussion groups to formulate their qualitative survey data. Focus groups can be exactly that - groups that focus and concentrate one aspect of the company's services or products.

Secondary data

This is data which has been collected by other organisations. Simple examples of secondary data are information that can be found in a library, or data accessible on databases on the Internet. There are a wide variety of types of secondary data which firms can use to analyse their customers and their competitors.

One example of secondary data is demographic data. Basically, demographics are the characteristics of a pre-defined population. Examples of these characteristics include sex, age, income, occupation, education and household size. These demographic dimensions of the general population are analysed by marketing specialists to group potential customers that are most likely to benefit from their product-line. This kind of data and analysis enables companies to better target their own markets and not waste marketing effort and material on people who would never be interested in their products or services.

Periodical articles are another great source of data, giving information on products, marketing, and different industries. Periodicals can be any magazines, journals or newspapers. Studying these can give you clues as to things like how your particular industry been making the news. You can discover which brand names are succeeding and you might be able to work out why. You might also be able to see what new marketing tactics have been put into use by your competitors. It is worth studying periodicals for your industry to see what the outlook is like for the future. All this is very useful data for marketing.

The traditional marketing mix is product, place, promotion, price. The Internet is certainly changing place, if not the others.

On the Internet there are a great deal of worthwhile marketing-related sites that will help you with your marketing push. There are a number of companies who can help you with the kind of data you need - both primary and secondary data and a mix of the two. This helps you to target your marketing effort and thereby save money.

As with periodicals, study websites giving news about your industry. What clues are there as to what other companies are doing? Look at the websites of your customers. What is the look and feel of the successful brands? What marketing tactics can you see that they are using? Which ones appear to work?

There are a lot of marketing opportunities on the new world of the Internet. Here are a few examples:

* Partnerships
* Affiliate marketing
* Website links
* Forums
* Networking websites

The last one is particularly interesting. The boom of social networking websites such as MySpace and Facebook is causing companies to have serious strategic re-thinks. Where they might previously have banned their employees from going on such sites, many now encourage it so that the company name, brand names, product or service type gets to be well-known. There are also a number of networking sites more aligned to business activity - such as Ecademy and LinkedIn. However, one problem with those is that they are full of people who are selling and not overloaded with people who are buying. Social networking sites may just have more buyers, but targeting is not easy when you're in such a populated Internet world!

Madusha Emeka Writes freelance articles. He owns and manages http://six-bucks.net/reviews/