Online marketing is a necessity in today’s competitive environment. It has played a central role during the last decade in changing how the customer relates to business and vice versa. The goal for the present and the future for online marketers is to know how to make your presence known, not simply to be online.
Starting with an introduction on the relevance of online marketing today, Chapter 1 defines the product categories and classifications generally used in the market. To support the argument, a literature review of the different key concepts, such as experience, search, and utilitarian and hedonic products, is provided. The goal is to re-discuss the entire subject of traditional marketing in light of the new features in online marketing, clarifying in the process how online marketing remains a complement to, not a substitute for, traditional marketing. Finally, the chapter investigates the drivers of consumer segmentation. The different segments are discussed in detail, highlighting their peculiarities. In particular, a great deal of attention is devoted to the demographic characteristics of the Internet shopper.
This chapter presents the different online marketing channels. It starts with display advertising and moves on to the subject of search engine optimization. These tools, along with e-mails with personalized newsletters, are necessary for companies to have a strong, effective presence on the Internet. Also, the completely new framework represented by social media, which has become relevant in recent years, is discussed. Finally, the chapter describes the new frontier of online marketing—mobile marketing—that is capturing new market segments.
Chapter 3 describes in technical detail metrics and analytics used in online marketing. Although the discussion is kept at a descriptive level, it provides explanations of advanced methods for keeping records of the results in investment such as social intelligence dashboards and real-time bidding analytics. To complement the discussion, the author presents real cases of implementation, showing the evolution of these metrics from their beginning use to the actual resutling measures. Also offered is a dynamic comparison among the present methods in terms of risk and profit generation. The final part of the chapter is devoted to ethics and security in payment, a topic that is gaining relevance with the increase of transactions on the Internet.
This chapter is fully devoted to pricing. After explaining the many price models available for online marketing, the author discusses the general area of dynamic pricing. The issue of fairness to consumers is explored with real cases and applications from different industries. Next is an explanation of reference price, the standard against which consumers evaluate a price. Stemming from a behavioral approach, this section of the chapter investigates how people form price expectations. The objective is also to study the evolution of reference prices from a firm’s perspective. Finally, there is an analysis on how to elicit reference prices from laboratory and field experiments, paying attention to internal and external validity.
Chapter 5 presents in detail the concept of overbooking, a revenue management technique used to maximize profits. The approach of this whole chapter is analytical, with the use of mathematical formulas. In addition, there is a discussion of the behavioral consequences, particularly in terms of unfairness, in line with what was highlighted in previous chapters.
In the concluding chapter, as a review of the concepts of the previous chapters, the author presents a case study applied to the hospitality industry. In particular, the power of online travel agencies, as opposed to that of the hotels themselves, in recent years in regard to booking rooms is explored. These findings apply widely to other services, such as airlines and car rental businesses. To respond to very recent new information, the chapter also presents tentative possible future scenarios, starting from the specific case of online travel agencies.
Online marketing has become a necessity in today’s competitive environments, especially amid the chaos of the cumulative financial crises of the past decade. The phrase “Innovate or die’’ comes into play in the everyday strategies of companies across almost all industries. Even the more traditional industries are urged to embrace the Internet as a marketing platform.
