Not Internet Marketing

In order to understand what internet marketing is, it is important to first understand what it isn’t.  Internet Marketing is not traditional marketing.  This may seem like I am stating the obvious, however, there are an impressive amount of people who run internet marketing campaigns, who are out of touch with current technology and approach their internet marketing like a traditional campaign.   How is internet marketing different from traditional marketing then?  There are really only a few basic differences between traditional marketing and internet marketing, putting aside the obvious technological medium differences.

First, You are Going to Need One These?

1) Appealing to Specific Interests
Internet marketing combined with geo-marketing places an emphasis on marketing that appeals to a specific behavior or interest, rather than reaching out to a broad and/or overly general demographic.  However, while “Off and On-line” marketers typically segment their markets according to age group, gender, geography, and other general factors.  Online marketers have the luxury of targeting by activity and geographic location with the knowledge that whatever it is that they are attempting to market, will be sought out by internet users.  For example, a snowboard company can post advertisements on snowbaording and  wintersports websites with the full knowledge that the audience has a related interest.

Internet marketing differs from traditional marketing, specifically when considering the use of print advertisements, where the goal is to appeal to the projected demographic of the given publication.   Because a given Internet Marketer or advertiser presumably has a knowledge of their target audience (people who engage in certain activities, such as, uploading pictures, contributing to blogs, etc.,) the advertiser or marketer does not have to solely rely on the expectation that a certain group of people will be interested in its new product or service; anyone on the web could stumble upon their website or users could be specifically looking for the content that is being peddled like in the example of the snowboard company above.

One on One?

2)One-on-one approach
The targeted user is typically browsing the Internet alone, so the marketing messages can reach them personally. This approach is used in search marketing, where the advertisements are based on search engine keywords entered by the user.

And now with the advent of Web 2.0 tools, many users can interconnect as “peers”

3) Geo targeting
Geo targeting (in internet marketing) and geo marketing are the methods of determining the geolocation (the physical location) of a website visitor with geolocation software, and delivering different content to that visitor based on his or her location, such as country, region/state, city, metro code/zip code, organization, Internet Protocol (IP) address, ISP or other criteria.

4) Different Content Served up by User Choice
An example of different content being served up by choice is the  geo-targeting of a website at www.whatever.com where the end users have the choice to select their geographic location first and are then presented with a different site or geographically pertinent content depending on the user’s selection.

5) Automated Content
With automatically served content in internet marketing and geomarketing or specifc geotargeting, the delivery of different content based on the geographical geolocation, as well as, the sharing of other personal information is automated.

While some would view or espouse that internet marketing is superior to traditional avenues of marketing, internet marketing is not without its disadvantages as well.  In the next article of this series on internet marketing, we will delve into the advantages, disadvantages, typical business models and some typical forms of internet marketing’s applications. Read more »

Gorilla Marketing

Are you interested in making profits for your small/medium business or practice on a limited or

extremely tight (see almost non-existent) budget?  Consider for a moment the use of Guerrilla Marketing Tactics and  you may be looking at truly unexpected results on your profit and loss statement.

Che Guevara

Since Guerrilla Warfare and Guerrilla Marketing are at their hearts very similar concepts, let us for a moment visit the ideology of Guerrilla Warfare.  Guerrilla Warfare, originating from the spanish word “Guerrilla” meaning small or little war, evokes images of Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, or Mao ZeDong relying primarily upon the unconventional tactics of working with limited resources, longer term goals, highly efficient use of energy, and imagination to fight off an adversaries with larger forces and larger amounts of resources or support at their disposal, with the goal of being victorious in a armed conflict.

Business Warfare

Guerrilla Marketing relies on essentially the exact same unconventional fundamental tactics that can be found at the root of Guerrilla Warfare, with the exception of the goal of Guerrilla Marketing being the creation of the greatest profits and highest return on investment possible for the small business, entrepreneur, etc.

To implement an effective Guerrilla based Marketing campaign for your organization or a client for that matter, it is of the utmost importance to review the following questions carefully and answer them honestly in order to determine which tactics would be the most applicable towards the situation.

1) What are my resources?  ie: Finances, Technology, Man Power, Access to modes of Infrastructure, Access to Intelligence.

2) What are my competitors/the competitions resources?  How could you get access to these resources?  Can you build a relationship with your competitor?

3) What are our specific goals?

4) What are our weaknesses? (This is more of a macro question, than a micro one, based on your perceived global weaknesses versus your true global weaknesses.)  How could the competition’s strengths help your organization’s weaknesses?

5) What are our competition’s/competitor’s vulnerabilities or weaknesses? (Both macro and micro weaknesses) How could a relationship with your organization strengthen their weakness or vulnerabilities?

After having had a chance to compile all of this data, now you can appropriately consider implementing the following tactics that are more or less the foundation of Guerrilla Marketing assist you in reaching your goals:

• -Your campaign should be based primarily on real-world psychology instead of judgement, experience, or guesswork.
• -Rather than fiscally based investments towards your campaigns, your primary investments towards marketing should be time, energy, and imagination based.
• -The primary measure your business stats should be the amount of profits, not sales.
• -Concentrate on how many new relationships are made each day, week, month, year.
• -Create a standard of excellence with a direct focus, rather than trying to diversify by offering too many diverse products and services.
• -Instead working towards getting new customers, aim for more gaining referrals, more transactions or interactions with existing customers, and larger actual transactions.
• -Your primary focus should not be on competition, but should actually concentrate more on cooperating with other businesses.
• -You should always be using a combination of marketing methods for any campaign.
• -Use all currently availble technology as a tool to empower your business.

Guerrilla Marketing is not a marketing style that is necessarily appropriate for all types of business and is really more geared towards the small business owner or entrepreneur, that is not to say that Guerrilla Marketing cannot be applied to larger  businesses (as it has been quite effectively, as we will see in future articles), however, the foundational concepts of Guerrilla Marketing are really more appropriate for organizations that are small, just starting out, or that simply just don’t have the resources to be able to invest large sums of capital into establishing marketing presence, such as, 501 c3’s or other types of not-for-profit organizations.

In our next article, we will be discussing the tactics and concepts of Guerrilla Marketing in greater detail, talking about actual examples of Guerrilla Marketing Tactics, Application and Efficacy.

This article about Guerrilla Marketing Tactics is meant to be the beginning of a soup-to-nuts discussion about Guerrilla Marketing, Tactics, Concepts, Real-World Application and more.  If you are a business owner, entrepreneur, or have purely an academic interest in this topic, please feel free to subscribe via RSS or contact us to have a copy of each article in this series emailed to you.

Welcome to Brute! Online News.  Please hang in there while we get everything hammered out.

Best,

Dr. Z

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