It is fairly safe to say that managers should always view web technology in light of whole marketing mix instead of merely as an extension of their existing advertising efforts. I have seen this happen again and again and therefore feel it is my duty to attempted to highlight some of ways that a website can positively impact each of these marketing mix elements:

Distribution (Place)

Ways to enhance your distribution networks may include using web portal to enhance logistics, create new marketing channels (for example affiliate channels) or provide better or faster product access for customers. Be careful however when creating new e-commerce sites as it is important to conduct a thorough online market analysis of your product to ensure that you are also competitive as far as other Internet based competitors are concerned. Internet retailers such as Amazon are growing in size and dominance and should be taken into account when planning any online strategy. Affiliate marketing channels may also be something to look into in terms of gaining more traffic to your site. New incoming marketing and information channels can be easily established by creating an affiliate program which entails other firms listing your site URL on their pages which in turn can equate to more traffic for your site. Look at your existing business referrers; can you enhance or strengthen these channels through use of effective and relevant hyperlinks?

Promotions

The growth of Internet’s accessibility is inevitable and firms would be well advised to start web advertising function as soon as possible. The reason for this is that “staying power” is paramount with more and more people starting to use web. Firms that have been around longest and which have high levels of interconnectivity will always maintain a pretty big competitive advantage over newer entrants. Once a firm’s web page has established a decent ranking and is featured on other related sites, ability for firms to utilize this coverage to reach out to new domestic and international markets can be quite powerful. The success of large Internet advertising campaigns is well documented. For me last US election was a real eye-opener as Internet marketing played a dominant role in key advertising campaigns with staggering amounts of marketing messages being delivered via Internet to target audiences.

When you send a mailing to your customers or prospective customers you are counting on making considerably more money in new business than you spend on mailing, right? It is obvious that if you were not going to profit from mailing, you wouldn’t send it out.

A little less obvious is that it costs almost same amount of money to send out a very attractive mailing piece with brilliant copy which is more likely to produce a great response rate as it does to send out a boring, poorly designed piece guaranteed only to land rapidly in trash. Why?

The major part of your expenditure is in mailing list and postage. The printing costs are about same for a perfect card as for a mediocre one. All right. So a good design and excellent copy is going to cost a little bit more. But only a little. You send out a postcard mailing to get a response (preferably lots of responses).