Article Preview
TopIntroduction
Online Marketing Communication is the concept that makes all the online available marketing tools to work together as a unified force rather than work in isolation. It refers to a set of powerful tools and methodologies used for promoting products and services through the internet (Pawar, 2014). The size of online marketing is growing as the use of internet is increasing at a rapid speed. Now, more and more users are connecting through internet and the amount of content available is also increasing because of the data generated through sensors, social networking sites, various machines, organizations, etc. Online marketing connects organizations with qualified potential customers and takes business development to a much higher level than traditional marketing. It makes the use of entire marketing efforts in the form of advertising, public relation, personal selling, sales promotion, internet marketing, direct marketing in order to generate maximum impact on the target audience at the minimum cost (Yuan et al., 2011; Deshwal, 2016; Rosa et al., 2012; Mehta, 2013). The trend of online marketing is growing day-by-day and so does its size.
Figure 1 shows the basic architecture of online marketing communication. The blocks above the dotted line represent Pull Advertising. The basic goal of pull advertising is to get the customers to come to marketers; hence the term pull is used, where marketers are attempting to pull customers in. Here, the customer visits the corporate website of the product to get exposure and information about the product, and at the same time, the marketer collects information about the customer which may be direct (through forms filled by customer) or indirect (through cookies). The blocks below the dotted line represent Push Advertising where the marketers try to take their products close to the relevant customers through intermediaries. This approach is a promotional strategy. The basic goal is to push the products to the consumers by the marketers; hence the term push is used. Here, the customer does not visit the products’ website but he/she gets the advertisement through different channels. These channels can be
- 1.
Visit to a third-party website: As the consumer visits the website of third party, he gets browsing utility and the ability to explore the product. The third party provides exposure of the product to the visitor and collects their information for the marketers in return of some financial payment from them.
- 2.
Downloaded Software: As the user downloads software he gets software utility as well as advertisement of some product with it. The information of the user is collected for the marketers in lieu of some financial payment from them.
- 3.
Emails: The customer gets direct mails from the marketers for providing information and exposure of their product.
Figure 1. Architecture of Online marketing communication
This paper presents a journey travelled by online marketing over years. There are total 6 sections in this paper. In the Section 2 a brief description of the history is given along with a table which explains their advantages and disadvantages. Section 3 contains some basic tools of Online Marketing Communication along with their approaches and types. Section 4 contains a brief introduction of the latest research ares of online marketing along with their literature review. In Section 5 this paper talks about the current challenges faced by recommendation engine and real time bidding system. Section 6 includes the Future Scope for improving these approaches and a brief conclusion of this paper.