Week 8 - E Marketing

My experience

I missed the seminar and lab for this week for the first time. This is because I became pregnant and being in the first stages of pregnancy I am strugling to keep up. However I decided to look into the lecture notes in the black board and maintain the blog as usual on a regular basis. This has become a difficult task for me. Therefore I decided that I will post as usual even though it is a small post and later on whenever I can to update the posts. This way I can make sure that I have at least one post per week.

E-Marketing
With the advancement in technology marketing has taken a new turn.  More and more people have started using new technology for their daily activities such as shopping and this has in turn affected how companies do marketing. For example online shopping as well as the usage of social media has increasingly become popular and this has made companies to include them in their marketing strategies and concepts for example how they plan their promotional mix such as product, price, place and promotion.

As suggested by Beynon-Davies (2004) good marketing approach will be reliant on good planning. Planning is an important element for e-marketing strategy. This will include;

An analysis of the environment for e-marketing.

In this the demand for e-commerce should be determined in particular market segments.

An assessment of current internal infrastructure which is made available to the company for e-marketing.

This will involve determining the feasible options made available to the company and evaluating the performance of the current infrastructure in terms of extending its e-marketing infrastructure.

Establishing a vision for e-marketing

This involves setting clear objectives for the use of e-marketing with regard to online contribution to company performance and the marketing mix of products, price, place and promotion.

5ps - Leverage Marketing

Reference :

Beynon-Davies P, E-Business (2004)

E-Activity 2

We were handed our second e-activity during week 6 lab which is to be completed by week 9 to be handed in on 15th March. this was to do with social networking and e-marketing.  We were given the opportunity to pick a company randomly and were asked to research their use of three social networking sites such as Face book, Linked in and Twitter.

This was one of the difficult tasks for me because I am not interested in using any of these social networking sites. However for the purpose of undertaking these assessment tasks I had to sign up with each one of these social networking sites. In order to do this I did some background research to find out if we are able to opt out of these services as and when you wish to do so and it turned out that we are able to opt out of their services whenever we want. This then gave me reassurance that I dont have to hold on to them if I dont like them.

Finally even though I didn't like the idea of signing up with these sites I decided that it is best that I learn about these and complete the relevant tasks for e-activity 2 and later on to delete my profile on these sites if I still didn't wish to keep them.