Why do online marketing?

Ok. I understand that your product and services do not have anything to do with the internet and so you believe that you do not need a website. My question to people like you is simple. So what if your product or server does not have anything to do with internet or not even with computers? But your customers definitely have everything to do with the internet!

The fact of the matter is that whatever be your business, product or service, you will find people looking for information about it in the internet. And you will lose them if you are not there where they are searching.

Websites are different

In fact there are various other reasons as well as to why an online marketing strategy is important along with your conventional channels. A website can *actually* help you market your product better even through the conventional channels. Let me explain this a bit more for you.

Let us take a conventional marketing channel such as a newspaper or a journal. Advertising in such a medium will improve visibility of your product or service. But this is passive advertising. You have done your bit and now are waiting for the results. If you wish to improve this then there are few things that you may be able to do.

For example, you can choose a specific journal that your target audience will read and increase the chances of conversion. You may become more creative and put in a coupon in the ad for a discount or a special offer. But the point is you still have no idea about how many people actually saw your advertisement.

Now let us compare this with your website. Unlike using a newspaper or a television as a medium for advertising, a nicely done website is an interactive medium. Even a website that does not have any mode for user to interact can provide you with a lot of information about the success of your advertisement.

What can analytics tell you?

The first and foremost information that you can get from your website is the number of people who actually saw your advertisement. You will never be able to get this from your conventional medium. Not just that, but you can also find out exactly how many of those were impressed with the information you provided there by analysing the time spent on your website by your visitors. Now this is just the very beginning of the amount of information that can be collected. Even with this you can do a lot to improve your business.

However this is just the very begging of web analytics and there is much more you can do. For example if you have a system in your website of protecting some information and allowing only registered users to access this. The advantage is that your unknown customers now become your prospects. You will now be able to call them and help them buy your product or use your service.

What can you do with this information?

The information that you collect from such analytics is very useful for you in targeting your users more accurately. You may wish to change some aspects of your advertisement content and see if this gets more people interested. Since your web analytics can also tell you the places from where there are maximum page views, you now have some idea about which geographical location to target for better sales success.

Accordingly, you may wish to step up your road show campaigns in areas where you feel more people may be interested. The possibilities are endless and it is up to you to think up of creative ways of improving your sales campaign through the information that you can collect through a well thought out web analytics strategy.