Overview of Cyber Marketing
From the beginning of the twenty-first century, the usage of computers is not limited only in collecting, storing and processing data, but its application has got revolutionary changes with the inception of the internet. Gradually the rapid growth of internet applications affects the wide range of areas such as education, trade, marketing, communication, management, and entertainment so that it becomes a part and parcel of our day-to-day life. Now the internet usage populations are also increasing rapidly.
The domain of marketing is also not far away from receiving significant changes after the internet revolution. For the promotion of products or services, the owners of MSME to giant industries can choose any of the major avenues between conventional and cyber marketing. Unlike conventional methods, cyber marketing is totally based on an internet system including promotion, product information sharing, communication, receiving feedback, distributing and receiving payments from the customers, though it is the sole decision of owners to choose any of the avenues according to their mission.
Cyber Marketing
The concept of cyber marketing is fully grounded on marketing products or services over the internet through various ways such as display advertising, search engine marketing campaign, blog marketing, content marketing, viral marketing, create videos of people using a product, social media, and email marketing. Comparing to the traditional marketing system, cyber marketing is a little inexpensive and it provides an opportunity to reach a band of computer usage customers.
Before two decades ago the concept of cyber marketing was irrelevant, but the revolutionary entry of the internet has increased the usage of computers at home rather than offices or organizations due to its online data handling capability. Considerably, the marketers found a new opportunity to promote their products or services with a new avenue. It advances the delivery system of output through trailing millions of customers, segmenting them online, giving the option to select customized products, fixing prices, providing appropriate information and services related to products and delivering the products to the customers by a proper distribution system. The transactions and every customer’s characteristic details are stored for future business opportunities with the customer and it also helps to know about customers’ preferences about products or services.
Structure of Cyber Marketing
In cyber marketing, marketers can communicate with customers directly. This new domain of customer-owner linkage may create more business opportunities. Now the marketers can make their own content about product details and offers in a more innovative and dynamic way. Whatever be the geographical zone, the marketers directly reach to the customers with their products and offers. Because of a direct relationship with customers, the marketers segment the customer’s group into subgroups according to the needs and preferences and these segments are utilized as a target customer group.
In the cyber marketing model, the first portion is ‘content’ which defines the objectives of marketers, identifying customers’ profile and creating a target customer community. The second part ‘community’ indicates the target community. In the traditional marketing process, sometimes remote geographical locations may cause the barrier to communicate with the customers. Cyber marketing removes this limitation by converting these existing communities into the cyber community. The transaction becomes more stress-free because of the presence of these target communities. In the third part ‘commerce’ portion, the customer can access all the product-related information available on the site and even the marketers also get to know about the customers’ characteristics. Payments are also be made electronically and the consumers can access the delivery process promptly online. So the cyber marketing concept opens a new door of opportunity for promoting and transacting products or services.
Features
The following features make differences between traditional marketing concepts and cyber marketing.
1. Consumer Details
In cyber marketing, various data mining tools are implemented to provide consumers’ profile details and these tools use the processes of sorting, bunching and correlating the similar characteristics of consumers in a group. Customers’ purchasing behavior and past transaction produce data automatically related to customers’ profiles. These data help to make customized products and to segment the entire market into subgroups to identify the actual target customers. In cyber marketing, the segmentation process may reach to the micro-segmentation where each customer gets equal importance. The recent growth in marketing indicates the presence of various cyber marketing tools.
2. Product Development
Producing customized products is one of the important features and for that purpose, the marketers use product optimization tools to align customers’ requirements with the objectives of marketing. Here the marketer can measure the profitability at each stage of customization.
Today many products including audio, video, cyber-related products, books are available in the market in digitized form and these digitized products can directly be displayed, presented and delivered through the internet. Other products that are more physical but have digital components can also present on the internet.
3. Branding
Branding is the image of a product or service to the customers which distinguishes it from other similar kinds of products. Products on the internet can benefit from branding for a repeated exhibition.
4. Fixing Prices
The Internet provides a large array of prices for different products and their significant features. Customers can easily get information and compare the less valuable feature with the important one. As the market is flooded with various products of different organizations and its varying features, the customers have the option to check the reviews of fellow customers before making a decision of purchasing. Customers get the benefit of better pricing and bargaining. Another significant feature of cyber marketing is the ease and speed of collection prices through the electronic money transfer system.
5. Promotions
Promoting products or advertisements generate a chain of impacts such as the creation of awareness, interest, desire, and action in customers’ mind. Internet marketing can finely tune up these impacts. So a customer can easily transfer from one impact to another with the inclusion of his or her personal characteristic. Like customized products and prices, customized promotions are also possible in cyber marketing
6. Distribution
Cyber marketing is also considered as attacking the distribution chain. As the emergence marketing concept through the internet, the task of distribution intermediaries have been obsolete. So saving cost and time of distribution is a significant contribution of cyber marketing.
7. Market Research
Specific market research can also be conducted on the internet by implementing various computer-assisted data collection tools.
Though cyber marketing has also certain limitations, still the accessibility and popularity of social platforms give ample scope to communicate and deal with the customers in a more inexpensive and effective way.
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This is a guide to Cyber Marketing. Here we discuss the Introduction and Structure along with Features of Cyber Marketing. You can also go through our other suggested articles to learn more –
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