Understanding Internet Marketing

So you want to understand Internet Marketing and ensure that you get the best from the Internet.

The main goals of Internet marketing are to expose your organisation’s message, products and services to users of the Internet. So let’s first discuss “Internet Users”.

Internet Users

There are two kinds of Internet users, buyers and researchers. Both have money in their pockets and they are certainly not mutually exclusive, that is to say that buyers often start as researchers and researchers often become buyers.

There are some obvious exceptions, school children doing research are unlikely to convert to buyers when looking for topics on there current history project. But in terms of commercial users, these are the categories.

We look at these user types as a cycle:

A user searches for a product or service, refines his selection of potential suppliers and then buys. However, sometimes the buy cycle is not immediate, often a person may take many days or even weeks to move through each phase of the process. So it’s important to tackle each of these steps.

Lets take a journey through an imaginary buying cycle and see what we find out.

Internet Research Cycle

Firstly I know that I require a widget, and that’s all I know at this point. I do a Google™ search for the word widget and I am inundated with a load of websites to choose from. I choose not to click a sponsored link as I know those websites are going to try to sell me something, I don’t want to buy at the moment so I stick with the organic links.

Now I read a few of the websites I have found and find that there are three main types of widget: Plain Steel, Silver & Gold. I also discover that silver is much better than steel, and although gold is better than silver there isn’t much in it. However the price of gold is more than double that of silver. OK, decision made, I need silver widgets.

Internet Refine Cycle

Now I go back to Google™ and search for silver widgets. Again I get back a significant number of results and this time, because I think I know what I want, I look at the sponsored links as well as the organic ones.

However, I am caught short. Silver widgets come in 3 different sizes 3cm, 5cm and 10cm along with shiney and matt finishes. Oh no, what to do?

I finally discover that I need 3cm matt finish silver widgets, at least that’s over. The website I’m currently on is selling them for £10.00 each, not bad, but then again, I’ve never purchased these before, can I get them cheaper?

Internet Buy Cycle

I go back to Google™ again and I search for “3cm silver widget with matt finish”. Now I get back much fewer websites, just a couple of sponsored links and all of the websites in the organic listings look a little too general.

I visit the first two sponsored links and the first two organic list sites and find that two out of the four sell these on the page I’ve just visited. That’s great, no more searching around on these sites. The other two sites are more complex, the search box on the site isn’t coming back with any results, and I can’t, for the life of me, find these widgets!

I end up going back to the 2 other sites that have the prices and find that one is priced at £8.50 each and one at £9.25. Great, both are cheaper. I did find, however that the cheaper one £8.50 is going to take up to 7 days to deliver but the one at £9.25 is in stock and can be delivered tomorrow.

I feel its worth spending the extra 75 pence to get it ASAP.

Job done!

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