Today is class we played Direct Marketing Jeopardy which was a great way to learn as well as refresh our memories related to the direct marketing course that I took last semester. We had revised a lot of the material in the previous class period, which really help with the game. I was doing the scoring for the game, therefore I was not allowed to answer the questions, but I was well prepared for the game. At times it really got me excited about some of the questions, because I knew the answer. Over all it was a great revision and a learning experience for us as it recapped the key aspects of Direct Marketing, while laying a firm foundation of this course of database marketing.
After analyzing my website with the help of Google analytics I was able to get a very unique view of my webpage. This analysis portrayed an in-depth view of my website which would benefit me greatly if I had a commercial website. Some of the things that the analysis points out are the number of visits, visitor location, top key words, and many more interesting statistics about the website in general. This information can really benefit a company’s website, because they can use this information to determine where the potential customers are located that are interested in their website and get a better understanding of their target market. I have about 82 visits on my website, out of which 62 were absolutely unique visits. Along with this I had about 256 page views, the approximate time that these visitors spent on my website was around 2 minutes and 44 seconds. Which is decent amount of time, keeping in mind that my website is related mainly to this class, hence it is not very enticing to visitors. The bounce rate on my website is 50.00%, which mean that 50% of the visitors that come on my website view only one page and then leave.
When analyzing the visitor location for my website, United States and India were the top two countries that I got the most visits from. I think this is mainly because I used Facebook to have my friends and family visit my website, so a few of them being in India explains the second highest view from that region. The highest amount of searches are from Search Engines, like Google, however I even got visitors that came in from site that refer my website. The top keyword that were used to search my website were; “Tanya Sharma” and “Future Ambition”. We seems pretty reasonable , if a person is looking for me or someone with my names, they will directly type it in. The top pages under my website are following in the order from top to bottom; Home Page/Blog, About Me, Future Ambitions, Resume, Achievements. The surprising thing about this list is that my resume is almost at the bottom, no one seem to be interested in looking at my resume. Over all, I think this is a great tool, the amount of information provided by this tool is surprising. This allows the company or an individual to analyze their website in a lot more detail and make some changes to help with the likability or relevance of the website.
Search Engine Optimization is a system that helps to improve visibility of a website. There are two types of SEO’s; organic search and paid search. It works by the relevance of the website and the likability of customers. Organic search is the unpaid search, this totally based on the relevance of the WebPages. The search engine uses things called crawlers that go through you website and look for key words that are relevant to the search done by the user. In order for the crawlers to work at their maximum efficiency, all the pages with-in a website must be linked together. This will allow the crawlers to get into all the detailed information available on that website which will in return allow the search engine to better access the relevance of that website. This allows an easier interaction between the user and the search engine. Some of the works that were on the top of the list were;
•One phrase
o Customer
o Great
o Company
o Market
•Two Phrase
o Tanya Sharma
o Customer Base
o Adopt Shelter
o Career Path
I was not surprised by looking at these words because many of my blogs are related to such topics. It was interesting to see the outcomes though, because Google ranking was able to analyze my entire website within seconds. Overall, I enjoyed the new and interesting applications that we use in this class, because these can a huge competitive advantage for me when I am working on real life projects.
When analyzing the McDonalds website a bit more in depth, to look for an OMIS job, I felt that I was able to get to the relevant job page in three clicks. I was not hard to navigate through the page. The options were clear, as it was very nicely laid out that a potential candidate can chose from a corporate career path or an in-store career path. Once the choice of corporate career path was made, the person can then use a drop down menu to decide the field they wanted to pursue and the state that they are looking to pursue this in. Once they have selected the desired fields, they will be taken to a page with the different job options available for the position they requested for. Once the best suitable option and selected and clicked on, the page is then navigated to a descriptions page. Then it elaborate further on the education and experience requirement on the job and the skills needed to perform the job in the most efficient manner possible. I like that the page ago mentions the travel requirement, so that it help in the decision making process of the person applying. I don’t know think that I site is too compelling because it has a lot of white space; they could have added more color to the site. Even adding a few more pictures of the office or the work space would be more attractive. I think the site can also improve on the coloring, just plain white page with back text and a little bit of red is not very attractive. We can add more colors and make the page more appealing. Also if they put some testimonial videos of employees that work at McDonalds, then this would increase the creditability of the work environment at McDonalds. The overall ease of use is great, things are laid out and divided into specific sections and pages, which makes it a lot easier to look through the information and extract proper information.
I would suggest that the McDonald should make their website a bit more interesting by adding more colors to the overall page. Inserting picture would also work great for attracting and keeping the attention of the incoming potential employee.
Went I was looking through the Kraft website, I found it really engaging. It took me about five clicks to get into the page for the job that I was searching for. I think they can make the navigation processes a little shorter. However, their website is really colorful and engaging. It really kept me engaged and interested entire time. I thought it was great that they are using and benefiting from their presence on the current social media. Compare to McDonalds I think this site definitely earns a higher score, because of its attractive features. However, I still do this a lot of white space in the website, but it is not too bad and can be fixed, as needed. This website persuade me more than the Mc D’s Website and seemed a lot more engaging. Overall, I enjoyed the layout and the organization of the website.
I have developed two advertisements for ADOPT pet-shelter that is located in Naperville. Since its adopt-a-dog month, my ads mainly are focusing on promoting adoption for this local pet. In both of my Ads, I have tried to keep the text same, however I have chosen different background pictures. One of my pictures is an adult dog and the second one is a Japanese chin puppy. I used A/B testing for this advertisements to see which one get a better respond and pull in more people to come and adopt at the shelter. In A/B testing means using the exact same advertisement, but just changing one variable, this allows the marketer to accurately measure which ad gets more attention and this is easier to measure the responses for the target audience. Keeping the context same and having just one variable different allows me to gather more accurate data needed for this project to figure out the right ad to send out for future advertisements. I pick the landing page which mentions the timings and days for dog adoption for this month. I think this is relevant landing page for this kind of adoption related advertisements. To determine the effectiveness of my advertisement, I would analyze the click-throw rate, which will indicate the amount of people that click followed the advertisement to the designated landing page to get further information on adoption of dogs at ADOPT pet shelter.
LOL Cat I made for mt Internet Marketing class by using photoshop.
Mr. Ryan Eugene is a webmaster in the IT supplies company; he has been working for this company since his graduation. Ryan has a background in Interactive marketing, with his bachelors from NIU. Ryan gave us a detailed look on how the company initially started off and which direction it plan to follow for the future.
Ryan started off by elaborating on the company’s background, describing that the company had a direct marketing base initially and eventually was able to step into the internet world. This allowed the IT supplies to gain a larger customer base. IT supplies did internet sales simultaneous to catalog sales. By developing a presence on the internet, IT supplies had to face many challenges of learning a great deal of new things. Ryan pointed out that this learning process can really benefit you and keeps you ahead in the fast evolving technology world. He point out the importance of keeping the customer engaged, by multiple things that are being displayed on a company’s website; things like color and layout can play a big role in attracting the customers too. However, he clarified that the relevance of the data is the most important factor, and it leaves behind all the other appearance factors.
Ryan, being the web designer of IT Supplies, talked about his process of developing the new website for his company. He described the real world use of many things that we have studied in class, such as saving a customer’s shopping list is they log out half way through their shopping process. When studying this in class, we called it “Purchase Process Streamlining.” Ryan also talked about Google analytics which help the company in segmentation process, allowing it to determine the most and least attracting parts of its website. Ryan also mentions the importance of keeping the customers engaged, and the tools they use on to perform this tag are blog posts and video’s; to address customer questions and comments. IT Supplies website also helps in new customer acquisition on a global scale at a much lower cost, when compared with the price of list and price of sending out a physical catalog.
Overall, I think it was a great presentation. It provided us with some great ideas and some great tools to imply and learn from when creating a website for our future companies.
One of the plug-ins that I used for my website is “1 Flash Gallery”, which is displayed on the top of my side bar. This plug-in allows us to create a picture gallery on our website. It’s a great tool for managing images without have to learn proper programming skills. I think it’s a great tool to display our creations as a marketer. We can also use this as a tool to market ourselves, so that the companies can get a personal touch with our website. This can be used to a greater extent if we happen to own a business; it’s a great place to display our products. We can link the images too; this allows the consumer to get further details on a product that might be of interest to them. This plug-in doesn’t really have a particular designer, it jus displays the website that designed this plug-in. The name of that website is “#1 Plugin.com.”
Here is the link to this plug-in –> http://1plugin.com/
My second plug-in that I used for my website is “WP touch”, this plug-in makes the site into a mobile application. It transforms the website into a application, changing the layout to best fit the smart phone screen and operating system. This works great when viewed from iPhone, iPod touch, Android, Palm Pre, Samsung touch and BlackBerry Storm/Torch mobile devices. It also allows you to customize smaller bits of the entire application, so that you can change it a desired appearance. This is a great new plug-in for businesses, keeping in mind that most professional carry smart phones and conduct a huge chuck of their business functions through their smart phones. It allows anyone to access the website through their phones without going through the hassle of trying to adjust it to fit to their screens. Even for customers, it makes it a lot easily to access the website and have it in hand whenever and wherever they want. I have used it through my smart phone and it works great. The host website for this is “bravenewcode.com.”
Link to plug-in–>http://www.bravenewcode.com/wptouch-pro
It was great to have a guest speaker in class last Wednesday. Mr. Chris Krohn, president and CMO of Restaurant.com, elaborated on many topics that are not only discussed in our class, but they also have great use and impact on the market. He started off by explain his company’s history, he discussed about the old model that mainly focus and treated all customers equal. It did not value the power of building relationship with the customers and gaining valuable feed backs from them. One of the initial plans of the company was to help different restaurants build websites with the new emerging technology called internet during the early 90’s. However, restaurants did not see much value in this during that time, which lead to the failure of this idea. Rather than just giving up, the company came out with a new game plan in which they worked as a middle man between the restaurants and customers. In the process of linking the two together, Restaurant.com also focused on changing their approach this time. Now the company was a lot more data driven and customer focused, they strived on have continues dialogue with the customers to help them change and evolve as per the customer needs. Through the development of healthy customer relationships, Restaurant.com was able to gain and retain a much larger customer base. Mr. Krohn pointed out a technique they use to help determine the exact focus for their company; this was the RFM segmentation technique. In this technique the customers are ranked on the bases of three criteria; Recency, Frequency and Monetary Value. A customer is ranked in each category and then based on an overall rank, the company decides and divides the customers into multiple segments based on profitability, this help the company determine and develop the elite customer base.
Once this was determined, Mr. Krohn focused on the different source they use to acquire their customers from. One of the source being affiliate, some blog or non commercial site recommends you on their webpage, which then sends you customers, and then you have to pay the a percentage of your sales from that particular customer. Second and the most important focus point is Search engine optimization. The main focus here is to develop and unique context which can greatly contribute to the success or failure of your online business. Mr. Krohn pointed out a few things that a unique context helps drive: Freshness of domain/ page, keyword relevance, internal link opportunities, external link acquisitions and social signals. The use of SEO can be relatively low cost with the maximum about of brand exposure. Paid search Marketing is another technique to acquire customers, this technique includes bidding for Google ads, which lead to immediate response and great brand can image development if the content is relevant to the search. Next topic that was touch upon was the Email Marketing; this was divided into two categories Trigger Email and Targeted Email. A triggered email is based on a customer’s action or movement within the website. The second one, targeted email is focused on customer relevant messages such as back to school, anniversary or birthday message. The biggest advantage of email marketing is that it is very cost efficient and provides the firm with instant results. Once we covered the emails, we jumped to public relations, which is mainly a third party validation message. This can build a good image in the customers mind and can be very useful during the time of crisis; this then leading into Social media as our next sources focusing and improving on customer service, brand awareness, customer engagement and customer feedback. Lastly Mr. Krohn talked about ILS marketing, detailing into loyalty programs, sales promotions and fundraising. A lot of these topics relate back to the things we have been over in class or have read in the chapter, which creates a better understanding of each topic. Mr. Krohn pretty much connected our academic learning to his real world experience which was just fascinating. I really enjoyed the presentation over all, keep me engaged and I learned quite a bit from it.
Have you ever had the feeling that there is some work that you have started, but were never able to finish. Well that story goes very well with my website project. I brought this domain name in high school, but never got a chance to actually build my website. This class have given me an opportunity to find tool and restart my website building task. With the help of wordpress,building a website seems like a much less complicated process. I plan to use this as my portfolio in the near future, during job search period. Hope to learn a lot more about this wonderful tool, so I can make my webpage even better.
Companies that I follow on twitter are:
Google- I like to keep up with the constant innovation and new ideas Google comes up with.
Facebook- Facebook is going through a lot of ups and downs, as well as a bunch of new changes. It is nice to stay connected as well as learn from the continues evolution of a company in the race to stay ahead of its competitors, who are not to far behind.
Gartner Inc.- I plan to go into market research and this is the dream land for market researchers, so i want to stay connected and know as much as I can about this company.
Apple- I do not own any apple products, but I like staying informed about their new innovations and creations.
Starbucks- Firstly, I just love Starbucks Fapps., but the main reason that i m following Starbucks is because I read an article about their international expansion in my Global Marketing class, that got me interested in seeing which direct they move into next and how they plan for this strategic expansion.
