To most people the term online marketing means SEO, SEM or banner advertising. In this article I intent to shed light on the true meaning of online marketing and its different facets.

Online Marketing

Online marketing is about increasing a site’s exposure, and traffic. Acquiring visitors is a tedious and difficult part of any online marketing activity, requiring patience and expertise. Internet companies often need to recruit expert knowledge in this field to enhance their existing business. When appointing marketing managers to head up this task, naïve online companies are often faced with people who may appear to have a widespread knowledge and expertise in online marketing but are in fact inexperienced themselves. The problems that the owners of these companies are facing only appears clearly after months or even years, when they suddenly realize that there is a lack of understanding in their marketing department. There are even cases where entire company structures were built and designed around the “wrong focus” and then crisis management is necessary to restructure companies to enable a more efficient and stable online business to exceed growth and profits.

The issues

In the online environment we are often faced with difficult decisions that often require widespread experience and understanding of the entire functioning of a company. What makes the online environment different from the normal land-based business environment is the fact that there needs to be a merger of expertise between the online marketing strategies, technical know-how, analytical abilities and unique, open-minded management qualities that can amalgamate different specialist employees into a strong winning team.

An out of the box management style is required to drive the team from a central point, but still allows the specialists to power the different sections of the business. But what on earth does this have to do with online marketing? Online marketing is unique and very different from the land-based marketing environment. Why? You might ask. Because the online marketing concept is still very new compared to the land-based marketing field in which you can obtain recognized degrees and diplomas. One might argue that online marketing at this time needs a much broader range of skills such as web programming, copywriting, knowledge of people’s online behaviour and the internet, and requires a faster pace of adopting to change and taking initiative.

The online environment

The online environment is very different from the land-based environment in that the needs and knowledge are different. A very important difference is the visual one. In a land-based environment things are viewed in images and online it is viewed in information. For example your marketing department will spend several hours planning the designs of billboard or magazine advertisements. The colours and layout must be just right to work! Marketing campaigns and promotions are planned 6 months ahead or sometimes even longer and the graphics department or outsource company has to redo the graphics over and over until it is perfect.

With the exception of a very few campaigns the online environment is not very graphically intensive, and has more to do with usability, information layout and information presentation.

This is why so often you will find that a marketer with little online experience will spend hours designing a graphic mailer with 100k or more file size. They will most probably make use of a tracking company’s statistics that will tell them the mail was served and opened by a large amount of users. After the campaign they will spend days trying to understand why the response was so bad and try to fix the graphic. Little do they realize that the graphic was never viewed by the majority of users but the tracking script was loaded the instant they opened the mail, telling the tracking software the mail was indeed read. The fact however is that they would accomplish better results making use of a text mailer and then the tracking data would have also produced much more reliable information.

A further problem the marketer has to face is the huge amounts of misinformation the Internet is stacked with when doing research. The real information is misunderstood as it often contains confusing technical information, or unreliable because it contains non-substantiated facts.

Online Marketing Cliques

It is a common belief that online marketing is a science that is hard to learn. Due to the competitive nature of the online business environment it is often found that the individuals that do know and understand the principles of online marketing are not willing to share their knowledge. When joining the forums where professionals openly discuss their strategies and information you only realize the amounts of misinformation presented, once you are included in the elite circles which very few form part of. Strategies are discussed and shared in secret with the use of secret forums and MSN discussions. It is only once you are part of these elite discussions that you get a true understanding of how the Internet works. Links are traded and publicly shared with fantastic initiatives that can polarize certain markets where you will often find that certain individuals dominate the market.

Reputations are made, protected and created within niche communities where these individuals often protect one another. But why do I tell you this? Why do I share this part of the Internet that you never knew existed? Because online marketing managers must understand that these communities exist. It’s my view that managers are rarely are on top of market trends and can find themselves in a situation where an online business starts following other leaders in the market causing them to stay in the position where they are, only growing as the internet grows naturally.

Making decisions suddenly caries more risk and the marketing manager, who normally profiles as an ambitious individual who wishes to make a name for himself/herself, starts to follow proven trends, who in turn becomes a follower. That is by all means the secret to how successful they are in their job function. They need this competitive approach to push a company to new heights. However it also makes them less open to input from others and therefore they struggle to fit in the online community where sharing of information and strategies are crucial in order to successfully plan ahead.

Amplifying factor

As said before, the ideal person to manage an online marketing department is the individual who has an online understanding, marketing knowledge and the technical understanding to back their decision making process. However these individuals are scarce and many of them still lack the personality profile that enables them to treat individuals within these different segments with respect for their specialist knowledge and expertise within a team environment.

The result if you have such an individual is an amplifying result. A good online marketing manager can be the factor that can enhance an online business as the mathematical multiplier that can have increases as high as 700% in profits!

Online marketing mathematics

In essence online marketing is very unique, not dependent on region and very much an international science with many commonalities across all borders. Acquisition and retention methods are the same. The 11 marketing strategies are applied in the same way and share an overlapping, strengthening each other to form the ultimate online marketing strategy. The mathematics is simple. Each of the 11 strategies is multiplied with one another and is directly equivalent to the attained success. Those of you who understand the power of compounded interest will understand the power we are talking about when all 11 these strategies are merged into the 2 main functions of online marketing.

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