online marketing essay

online marketing essay

The Evolution and Impact of Online Marketing: A Comprehensive Analysis

1. Introduction to Online Marketing

When it comes to purchasing behavior, online shopping is not the only way to obtain information online. The internet can be used for advertising, direct sales, and for businesses to identify market conditions and consumer demand for various goods and services. Not surprisingly, companies have tried to use the latest technology to improve their online marketing as much as possible. However, the premise of any marketing is to understand the development and behavior of the target market. The internet is no longer a brand new platform, and the novelty of consumers towards online marketing may have reached a certain stage. This article explores the maturity of electronic exchanges in online marketing. In understanding any marketing method, whether traditional or new, it is necessary to understand its development process in order to appreciate its advantages and disadvantages. The maturity of new network marketing channels, that is, the degree to which the new channel marketing method has been identified and used by marketing practitioners.

The internet was created in the late 20th century. Since then, it has rapidly spread throughout the world and become the most representative symbol of the current information age. It has been stimulating almost every industry on the market to change. The internet has revolutionized the way people obtain recognized brands by allowing them to invest directly in e-commerce. With the development of science and technology, the electronic exchange market has begun to develop gradually. The electronic exchange market is a virtual market platform that uses the interactivity and worldwide connectivity of the Internet to link the world to provide products and services to people around the world.

2. Key Strategies and Techniques in Online Marketing

The objective of this section is to provide a coverage of this domain by discussing the key strategies of business, content, and creation of the web that form the core of the potential listening revenue; placing emphasis on the importance of these strategies and how they need to be aligned by the marketers; discussing several market analysis models including primary data assessment, tracking, and budgeting; investment perspectives; unique product push and pull advertising modes; comparison of related branding structures; relationship maintenance and management systems; and online advertising. These discussions are summarized in the subsequent sections.

The business has to redraw their strategies in strategizing, market analysis, and customer care mechanisms to reap the benefits of the web, and the most effective way of doing this is evolving an efficient and effective online marketing strategy. An online marketing management strategy requires a new and unprecedented attention to capturing position-sensitive, yet undoubtedly fragile relationships in the web market place. In this context, we have briefly outlined the competitive and strategic application of online marketing. Table 1 lists some of the characteristics of the web marketing world juxtaposed against classical attributes of businesses. Some key ideas developed by various authors have been summarized. Although the understanding and the development of strategic online businesses is in its infancy, several categories of efforts are being practiced. They include operational innovations in business models; new ways to think about products; and new forms of strategic web partnering, which result in the business outcomes characterized as vertically syndicated commerce, rotated web businesses, customer-integrated web systems, and dynamic ambient commerce. The marketing philosophy, concepts, and models of online marketing provide a comprehensive classification of these tools, strategies, and devices.

The internet and innovative usage of technology have centered the concept of virtual communication. Business organizations saw this as a distinctive breakthrough and have redesigned their strategies. They now compete heavily on the keyword domain. The result of this is that today we can easily find who the cheapest stock broker is, which mobile phone company is offering the scheme of the day, or who is running the lowest fare scheme for the travel season. The easy flow of digitized information captured in the web environment has cleared the barriers involving physical geography and time. The internet world does not close and businesses operate 24 × 7. The global market is at your doorstep. Your business is one click away. In spite of its promises, the new age of virtual businesses is only the beginning. The future that the internet has opened is formidable. There are unique operational, technological, economic, and strategic challenges that have to be faced and acted upon.

3. The Role of Data Analytics in Optimizing Online Marketing Campaigns

Historically, a challenge that researchers have faced when working with clickstream data is the dearth of information about the unique consumers that take actions on websites. While we have limited information about browsing behaviors for all website visitors, firms like Google or Oracle do possess unique individual identifiers and can provide a broader history of all actions made by a consumer in the digital world. These companies monitor the web activities of the average consumer in a myriad of contexts across many different platforms. Their clickstream datasets consist of both aggregated-level user activity and unique-user browsing activities. Aggregated-level user activity provides a summary of website visitors’ behavior, such as the visitor history pattern of a specific website. Unique-user browsing activities focus on recording a user’s behavior while being guided through particular tweets. Firms constantly analyze the interaction between the unique users and their websites or digital marketing campaigns to develop textual and visual content that suits particular consumer habits and interests. The insights that can be drawn when unique-user browsing data is combined with digital marketing content are truly powerful. However, historically these firms have been unwilling to share this data with the academic community because it is considered proprietary and has high requirements for privacy protection. As such, digital marketing research researchers have been precluded from obtaining a clear understanding of how consumers learn from digital marketing communications. This has led researchers to utilize clickstream datasets, which have less comprehensive information on the unique user level. The dearth of browsing data on unique customers has restricted most of the exploration to aggregate (rather than individual) behavior and to trends that cover total traffic, instead of individual customer’s unique visit choices.

In the age of digital marketing, customer data is the foundation for understanding customers and successfully developing and executing effective marketing campaigns. Today, consumers leave digital footprints, and both large and small firms generate vast amounts of customer data that offer important insights: audience reach, purchase details, demographics, and much more. Yet, making sense of the data can be a significant challenge. Collecting and capturing the data generated by interactions with websites, which we refer to as clickstream data, presents a challenge. Each action taken by the visitor unfolds across several distinct layers: the consumer, the browser, the website, and the host server, and clickstream systems must have access to each layer to reveal a complete trail for a visitor. User privacy constraints also restrict access to parts of the user clickstream when third-party resources like Google Analytics are used to collect clickstream data.

4. Ethical Considerations in Online Marketing

There is currently no ethical code of conduct in place for online marketers. This may result in Web marketing techniques that are more aggressive and more invasive. Marketers believe that their corporate codes of conduct are adequate in taking care of this area. Teen-specific marketing issues are not addressed in the company codes of ethics, which currently cover only employee conduct and treatment of suppliers. In other words, the Internet has outpaced not only conventional ethics policies but ethical theory as well. Since there are no ethical criteria yet defined for online marketing practices, we opted to use Kohlberg’s theory of moral development in our study. An understanding of value-altering and behavior changing mechanisms will serve as the first step in suggesting theory-based criteria for corporate and regulatory oversight of Web advertising directed at youth.

Ethics are increasingly becoming an important issue for online marketers as they launch a diverse range of products and services to an increasingly wired consumer base. Ethical concerns are even more pressing when marketing to children and adolescents on the Web. The Web indeed is a valuable and important medium for delivering information to youth. However, the Web presents unique marketing challenges; ethical guidelines in the print medium are easy to enforce, but the interactive Internet medium is in its infancy and may lead to the dissemination of false and misleading information. So when online marketers create fun activities, games, and contests, or use any viral marketing in order to attract youth to their websites, they also share an ethical responsibility.

5. Future Trends and Innovations in the Field of Online Marketing

In recent years, online marketing has become quite complex, and achieving a return on investments (ROIs) is more difficult than before. It is believed that the number of things to be taken into account and the complexity of online marketing practices are likely to increase in the future. Marketers should always keep in mind that no matter how good their initiative is, if their customer’s experience is terrible, it will be a waste of time and money because the customer cannot appreciate the value of their marketing preference. Despite the fact that personalized service is often mentioned in online marketing, attention has only occasionally been paid to the impact of technology in personalization because online marketing is sometimes compared with traditional marketing in which a person is involved in the customization process to meet every single customer need. Companies of various sizes and industries will mark personalized sales and marketing. Artificial intelligence can automate such personalized activities. Now, service firms can use data to make reasonable offers, which can increase the positive customers’ response and appreciation of artificial intelligence.

Impicciatore, Lamberti, and Dinaro discussed nine future trends and innovations in online marketing. First, they mentioned programmatic marketing, which is the future of online marketing as far as most trends are concerned. Second, they emphasized the value of content marketing, which should be carefully implemented. Third, they pointed out that large data should effectively be used to better target customers. Fourth, they mentioned the importance of social media advertising and engagement. Fifth, native advertising received a lot of attention as well. Improvements in the use of mobile marketing were also considered. Seventh, they warned against the risks of being invasive in our marketing efforts. The last two remarks they have about online marketing in the future were with respect to artificial intelligence—more complex data processing giving insights to gaining a competitive advantage by customizing one’s offer using chatbots and personal assistants.