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onLine Marketing
Even though the Internet has played a big role in changing our lives since 1996, it wasn’t until the mid-2000s when marketers started to use the Internet in a big way to market their products. The old, tried, tested and true methods that were so successful with offline mediums don’t seem to work very well on the web. No one sits still online – we multitask. We also use search engines to find information on the web. How do marketers get a message through in an environment where the competition is just one click away? The good news is that the Internet hasn’t changed the basic goal of marketing. What has changed is the way marketers must engage and motivate customers.
In this chapter we’ll the discuss the characteristics of Internet and demonstrate how as an enabling technology, it provides marketers with new opportunities to connect to customers.
CHARACTERISTICS OF THE INTERNET
When Internet usage became widespread in the late 1990s – primarily due to falling access and hardware costs – there was considerable hype that the Internet would completely displace traditional business models. Many dot-com companies, as they were known at the time, were focused on revenue growth, rather