Page 232 - Electronic Commerce

Marketing on the Web

the charitable organization. When visitors click a link on the affiliate’s Web page, a
donation is made by a sponsoring company. The page that loads after the visitor clicks the
donation link carries advertising for the sponsoring companies. Many companies have
found that the click-through rates on these ads are much higher than the typical banner
ad click-through rates.
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Viral Marketing Strategies and Social Media
Traditional marketing strategies have always been developed with an assumption that the
company would communicate with potential customers directly or through an
intermediary acting on behalf of the company, such as a distributor, retailer, or
independent sales organization. Because the Web expands the types of communication
channels available, including customer-to-customer communication, another marketing
approach, viral marketing, has become popular on the Web. Viral marketing relies on
existing customers to tell other people—the company’s prospective customers—about the
products or services they have enjoyed using. Much as affiliate marketing uses Web sites
to spread the word about a company, viral marketing approaches use word of mouth
through individual customers to do the same thing. The number of customers increases
the way a virus multiplies, thus the name.
BlueMountain, an electronic greeting card company, purchased very little advertising
but grew rapidly. When people received a Blue Mountain Arts electronic greeting card by
e-mail, the link they clicked to open the card led to the Blue Mountain Arts Web site and
they were likely to search for cards that they might like to send to other friends. The
company built a large following using its approach to viral marketing.
Today, many viral marketing campaigns involve use of social media sites such as
Facebook or Google+ and social communication media such as Twitter. A key element to
understand when doing promotional activities in these social environments is that people
do not use social media to shop; they use social media to socialize. This means that
marketing with social media is best done using an indirect approach. Instead of informing
the community that it has something to sell, a company is more likely to generate viral
activity by encouraging members of the community who use their products to discuss how
desirable the product or service is. Getting the community to discuss a product or service
in a positive way is the goal, rather than simply delivering a promotional message to the
community. Direct advertising communications, whether they are postings on sites like
Facebook or Google+, or are tweets (as communications in Twitter are known), are likely
to be ignored by the community.
Some companies make the mistake of posting a large number of information items in
the social media environment. Because most people active in social media have a large
number of friends, sites such as Facebook include mechanisms for filtering out
information periodically. If you post too often, your posts can be filtered out by these
mechanisms before very many people see them. The key to viral marketing in this
environment is to post frequently enough that your presence appears to be active, but not
so often that your posts or tweets get lost in the clutter or filtered out of the environment.
The number of individuals who associate with your social media site is a good metric
for organizations to track as they assess the success of their viral marketing activities.

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