Internet Marketing - Best Web Hosting Reviews

The Good

Good marketing consists of sales and promotion tactics that create a relationship of trust and interest between your business and your potential customers. The wide plethora of good tactics available to you can include obvious things like advertising and informative sales pitches, or less obvious but still marketing related strategies such as search engine optimization, social media brand building campaigns and person to person networking.

In all cases, the essential rules that you need to follow in order for your tactics to be considered ?good? consist of honesty, communication, delivery of value and open communication with the people you?re trying to convince.

Of all good marketing practices, the best, most effective and most promising in terms of long term stickiness with buyers are strategies that you?ve geared towards creating a base of ?true fans? who loyally follow your brand because they trust you, trust your products and believe that you won?t disappoint them down the road. In essence, you?re giving them value and turning these people into willing buyers because their genuinely being given something of value in return.

The best platforms for ?true fan? marketing are those that let you organically network your way towards a base of customers. These include word of mouth advertising, social network fan bases built through viral campaigns and mutual benefit and marketing by letting the quality of your product or service speak for itself through others and general perception.

An excellent example of how successful good marketing practices like the above can be is Apple. Their customers don?t need to be pushed into buying iPhones, iPads and iServices like the cloud and messaging systems; they know that they?ll get a great product in return for their money and willingly buy into the brand. Apple buyers are genuine fans of the company?s offers.

Some Practical Tips:

• Offer real value to your customers. Your products/services should act as their own form of marketing once they?re on the market and being used.
• Don?t lie or mislead about what you?re offering, be honest about exactly what you?re selling and deliver on it.
• Network through social media landscapes and person to person avenues; answer questions, respond to criticism constructively and address reasonable client complaints in a timely, and public, manner.
• Learn to use analytics and market research tools. Take advantage of what they tells you and adjust your marketing campaigns accordingly. Knowing your customers and their needs as intimately as possible is your greatest asset for competitive advantage.

The Bad

Bad marketing can be classified under two general categories: intrusive marketing and irrelevant marketing. The first will annoy people deeply and cause them to stay away from buying decisions even if they might have otherwise liked what you?re selling while the second category will just fall flat on deaf ears and cost you a lot of money or time (or both) while it does.

Companies that engage in intrusive marketing tend to follow practices like heavy use of junk mail, annoying online ads that interrupt a viewer?s activities and spammy messages on phones, emails and social media accounts, which just piss users (read potential customers) badly.

The other example of irrelevant marketing, intrusive marketing, can also be intrusive, but mostly it just falls flat and costs a lot of money pointlessly. Intrusive marketing can include things like badly placed PPC ads, banner ads that nobody pays attention to, ads for products appearing on websites where they dynamic leads to virtually no buyers, or advertising that?s aimed at an audience that simply offers no potential market for your products.

Irrelevant marketing and intrusive marketing are both symptoms of bad market research and incomplete familiarity with target customers. Irrelevant marketing is the worse of the two because it?s not even reaching a potentially responsive audience while intrusive marketing, as annoying as it is, can still garner some sales if at least aimed at the right target audience.

Some Practical Tips

• DO your market research; knowing your target market will go a long way towards saving you from bad marketing that falls flat or annoys.
• Pay attention to analytics as your marketing campaign unfolds. Use tools like Google Analytics, Crazy Egg and others to see how your campaigns in social media, mobile marketing and PPC are going. Analytics derived response rates will quickly tell you if your marketing is bad marketing
• Don?t be afraid to scrap a failing marketing process. If it?s not delivering reasonable results, it?s not worth your time.
• Make your networking an social marketing count. Talk to your target audience and create relationships of trust with them; don?t just push sales at them.

The Ugly

And finally we come to ugly marketing, in some of its nasty manifestations, with all of its nasty consequences. So, what is the truly ugly in marketing? Well, it?s not something so simple as aesthetically crappy advertisements. No, we?re talking about marketing that downright messes with people in ways that can cause damage.

Some good examples would include campaigns that take advantage of ignorance by spreading lies in their favor, marketing strategies that try to defraud their customers, pressure tactics that force people into buying through contrived circumstances, and (specific to the digital world) spam marketing in all its manifestations.

This last type of marketing strategy can be broadly considered as a type of malicious, intrusive spam and can include basic things like junk spam email or involve downright invasive ?advertising? tactics in which peoples computers are hacked into forcing them to a certain website where they have to buy a product in order to clean their computer of what the marketer hacked them with in the first place.

Spam marketing can barely be called marketing in many cases and in its most invasive forms, it can cause a lot of damage to the digital or computer assets of individuals and companies. Spam can clog networks, servers and databases while adware bots can destroy computer files and slow down electronic devices. Despite there being technology that can retrieve some of this data using digital forensics, it?s better to be proactive against these types of attacks.

When it comes to certain extreme and spam oriented forms of ugly marketing, data protection expenses have to be shouldered by companies and individuals who need to then secure their data, clean their computers and conduct security measures like penetration testing regimes or firewall installation to prevent future spam.

Furthermore, the people who engage in spam marketing or deceptive advertising practices in general might themselves suffer heavy consequences in the form of lawsuits, criminal charges or, when it comes to digital spam campaigns, counterattacks by the people they?ve harmed.? Neither is this last possibility is a joke; hacker groups like Anonymous have indeed gone after companies whose reputation for dishonesty grew too big.

Some Practical Tips:

• DO NOT lie to your customer base, or deceive them or manipulate them through pressure into buying what they don?t want or need. This is not a recipe for long term success.
• Do not use spam and especially avoid working with anyone who offers to use malicious adware in order to help you create sales. In many places, doing wither of these activities can get you criminally charged and fined out of financial solvency in a hurry.

About the author: Kyle Olson is a well-respected writer in the marketing industry and has covered a litany of topics for over 15 years. When he?s not busy writing poignant articles about marketing, you can find him covering LWG.

Source: http://www.thegrizasonline.com/internet-marketing-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly

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