Marketing 2.0 - eMarketing, Digital marketing, Interactive Marketing, Online marketing, Internet Marketing, Web marketing...

While I have been writing about Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0, Professional and social networking, here is the new paradigm or future of marketing or the Marketing 2.0. I was browsing through LinkedIn Answers and saw this question by a gentleman who wanted to know which term you would prefer out of E-Marketing, Web Marketing, Digital Marketing, Online Marketing, Internet Marketing or Interactive Marketing. Well I succinctly answered Marketing 2.0, as that is something which has changed the new rules of marketing and probably would make Kotler re-write his book.

In this entry I am touching upon various elements of Marketing 2.0 and how it can benefit your organization. When I say your organization in this post, I mean both B2B as well as B2C businesses.

These would be some of the basic elements of Marketing 2.0:

Online communities, Blogs, User-generated content, Email Marketing, Viral Videos, Online PR, Flash Ads, Torrents, Porn Sites, Software Downloads, Banners, Link Exchanges, Micro Sites, Landing page optimizations, triggered ads, behavioral ads, web analytics, SEO SMO and SEM.

Online communities, Blogs, Social / Professional Networking and User Generated Content: -

Earlier I wrote about push marketing being dead and how 4Rs of marketing namely Reveal, Reward, Respect and Retain has changed the approach of marketing to customer centric marketing.

This can be simple achieved today through online communities or Blogs where users generate content and the content becomes the king. So instead of pushing the message out, you are able to pull the customers towards you and with Content being the king, people get motivated to come back. There are numerous examples of this technique: like LinkedIn, Xing, and many more.

How they sell?

Online communities and blogs market and sell the products through subtle hints which might be relevant to the audience. Considering the context and relevancy approach is more suited to the audience, they tend to look at what is on offer and if that is something which is of importance to them at that time, they make a buying decision.

Email marketing: Many online community and blog owners use an additional tactic of Email marketing. Additionally many product and services companies also leverage email marketing media. It has shown highest ROIs for a long time now and the effectiveness has been good. However, now the point to be noted is that instead of pushing the message, people have now moved to opt-in based database communication.

There are many ways how people are generating lists, through Whitepapers / Research Reports / Surveys / Email list building newsletters and Micro sites and landing pages etc.

Many solution providers provide email marketing system which are on demand and web based like: http://www.responsys.com/ , http://www.e-dialog.com/ , http://www.constantcontact.com/ , http://www.verticalresponse.com/ , http://www.exacttarget.com/ , http://www.listrak.com/ , http://www.returnpath.com/ , http://www.vtrenz.com/ , http://www.bronto.com/ , http://www.lyrishq.com/ , http://www.epsilon.com/ , http://www.yesmail.com/ , Experian – Cheetah Mail, Acxiom, Harte-Hanks and Datran

Porn Sites, Torrents, Software Downloads:

Yes, sex, videos, hot are amongst the world’s most searched terms, if you were searching for “hot trends in videos”, with high probability it land you on to a porn site intentionally or unintentionally. And a lot of them do catch your attention. It’s a quick source of gratification and you would see these websites as target for heavy advertising from many B2C websites. Even though you may not buy in to the philosophy of your company’s remote association with these sites, but practically, these websites generate traffic to your websites.

People of all ages and genders and all geographies visit these websites, and they become a potential target to promote that viral video of your which is part of your marketing campaign.

Similar to these are the Torrents and Software Download websites: In recent campaigns done by http://www.ibibo.com/ they leveraged the torrents and software download websites very effectively. They actually created and posted torrents worldwide of most searched items like e-books, softwares, movies, videos, cracks and keygens etc and when someone will actually download and run those files, they were asked to enter their email address and were automatically directed towards the website.

Viral Videos and Interactive Marketing

These days many organizations are leveraging the Viral Videos to promote their products and services worldwide. The success of the Viral Video campaigns has actually given rise to companies like http://www.webchutney.com/ , http://www.interactiveavenues.com/ , http://www.goviral.com/ , http://www.quasar.co.in/ and more...

* this post is not yet completed. I will be adding more content soon on Behavioural Marketing, Triggered Ads, Landing pages and microsites and related content.