The Changing Face of Marketing: How The Internet Has Transformed How Companies Plan Their Publicity Strategies

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September 11, 2010

One of the biggest challenges facing any business, particularly a new one, is making the market aware of the service it provides. It is no good being the most accomplished artisan in the surrounding area, or manufacturing the best value merchandise in your line of work, if consumers don’t know about you. Promotion and marketing are necessary. That’s why huge quantities of money are lavished every year on adverts. Everyone has seen conventional means of advertising such as classified adverts, of course. But today following the birth of Internet business, there are online jobs committed to improving a company’s Web profile, and people doing these jobs often work from home in place of a normal office, to accomplish this.

Someone I knew once started up an antiques shop. He was an excellent store manager, and produced a beautifully laid out store containing all types of interesting collectibles, at sensible prices. Unfortunately he just couldn’t understand the necessity to make known the shop’s presence. He thought adverts were too dear, and he never got round to a successful marketing campaign. His shop in due course shut down, as a result of poor sales. One person who entered the shop shortly before it ended, told me that he lived a short distance away and he had not previously known of its existence.

Old style press advertising is in decline. Rivalling it is the increasingly significant domain of Internet business in which companies promote their products with the use of professionally developed websites. Website designers invariably work from home in online jobs employing Web software to produce stylish websites for businesses. Internet advertising is also a increasing field of business. Some ads can be extremely infuriating as they emerge as ‘popups’ when a link is clicked on, even if the advert has no relevance to the link and you are not in the least interested in whatever the popup is attempting to sell.

Now that’s the conundrum. When consumers are looking for paper-based ads, they find them in the relevant pages of a local or national paper or a trade publication. We haven’t got a Web based equivalent for this, so what alternative do people use? They go to search engines, typing in a keyword which sums up the topic of interest, and reading what the engine shows may be appropriate. However given there are a huge number of websites arguably relevant to the keyword, how can a search engine decide the sites it will give the highest ranking?

This is where a different variety of online jobs has has arisen, improving websites making them more likely be ranked on page one of a Web search, and hence get a larger number of hits from searchers. In the world of Internet business, the website becomes the advert, so that rather than ads coming to potential customers such as in a commercial break on TV, the market comes to the websites guided by the search engines. Therefore there is demand for people who can work from home boosting search engine rankings.

From a business viewpoint, this way of doing things has a significant advantage. An advertisement, in whatever medium it it is shown, carries the same cost, whether it brings in lots of new business or makes no perceptible difference. On the other hand, how well a website is optimized will only be ascertained by its position in the search engine rankings. Clients only have to compensate the optimizing specialists, if they succeed in getting the website onto the top page of the search output. Clearly it is likely that those motivated to enter the keyword will look at the first few sites in the search results and buy things there.

The world of marketing has been revolutionized by the Internet, yet particular fundamentals are unchanged. Informing people about your products is a fundamental part of Internet business no less than for more traditional kinds of business.

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