Sunday, September 9, 2012

Interactivity in Online Marketing



Interactivity in Online Marketing

Interactive Marketing is what distinguishes the old marketing techniques from the new marketing style. In the past, sellers using old marketing techniques would try to persuade their audience by pushing media to as much people as possible instead of focusing on their target market; this would create traffic into their stores and/or websites. Companies would send out tons of offers to different consumers asking to purchase their products and then try to create some sort of relationship with them. Yes, this technique worked at times; however, the main problem was that companies lacked a relationship between the buyers and sellers.

Using interactivity in online marketing is extremely beneficial; it gives you tons of different ways to make more personal connections with your audience. It’s all about creating a bond with your customers and building trusting relationships. With the Internet at an advantage, the old days of making cold calls became a tool of the past. Now a days, companies can interact with their target audience in many ways that would have been though impossible or even overly expensive just a few years ago. Online interactivity shouldn’t primarily focus on just having a conversation; it should also focus on showing results in advance for the customers. Consequently, people will be much more willing to do business with the company due to the fact that they care about solving their customer’s problems/issues.

Three things you must do to succeed in online marketing:

The first thing you need to do to succeed in online marketing is attracting visitors to your blog or website. You can attract visitors by using different interactive features on your website or blogs such as: videos, forums, webinars and auto responder email sequences in order to convince your customer that they must buy from you. There are several tactics a company can use such as: paid advertising (Google Adwords,) social networking sites (Facebook or LinkedIn,) and article directories (Ezinearticles and Articlesbase.)

The second thing you need to do to succeed in online marketing is once you have already started driving traffic to you site, you may begin interactivity with your visitors and turn them into customers. There are several different ways this can be done; for instance, you can create forums in which visitors can post comments, share ideas and insights regarding your company. This will help create a buyer and seller relationship and will make the customer feel as if the company has a personal interest in them.  

The third thing you should do to succeed in online marketing is converting your visitors into leads. On your website or blog you should have a signup form where visitors can join your email list. You should offer them some incentives such as something of value like discounts, coupons or free samples. Make sure not to constantly hammer your customers with tons of emails trying to convince them to buy something from you instead send a decent amount of emails offering a great deal of value. As time progresses you can slip in a sales pitch here and there and the customer won’t feel as if they are only just a prospect to you. Using interactivity in online marketing will definitely help increase your company’s chances of success. It will help create a more personal connection between the buyer and seller resulting in a higher chance of becoming a repeat customer. 


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2 comments:

  1. You make a great point. Consumers love to be fed information, and they seek out information from brands. Brands must take advantage of these tools to develop empathetic relationships with the consumers that are already out there searching for the product or service.

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  2. [Christian Villanueva]

    Great comparison between the new and old ways of marketing. Consumers must always be attracted to something in order to build interest with marketing techniques as you mentioned. I agree, too many emails is always annoying and easy to avoid with simply pressing the "Unsubscribe" option. You want to give the option to the customers, but try your hardest to keep them from clicking on it.

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