Book Report on "Internet Marketing Project"

Book Report 14 pages (4760 words) Sources: 17

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Internet Marketing

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Market Analysis

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Web traffic plan

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Recommended sites

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Convenience survey

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P.18

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Recently a social networking site aimed at graduate and undergraduate students at CQUniversity Australia was begun as a Facebook page. The upstart site MarketNet is also being used as a tool to give students first-hand experience in the field of online marketing as they are required to make additions and changes to the site.

In this essay the reader will learn about the efforts of one student who performed a market audience analysis and then developed a web traffic plan that, if implemented, is designed to influence the number of visitors to the site. Three websites are suggested additions as links that visitors should find valuable and make MarketNet more relevant to its community.

Finally the author had the opportunity to create a short survey aimed at determining the level of satisfaction of the visitor with the overall components of the site. References and a sample survey are included.

Internet Marketing Project

1.0 Introduction

Marketing is defined by the American Marketing Association (AMA) as "the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large." Marketing as a whole is constantly changing for the dual reasons that customer tastes evolve and new avenues for advertising are constantly evolving. The latest advertising fad is internet marketing and its onset has opened up a panacea of marketing possibilities.

There are a number of terms for internet marketing including online, web or search engine marketing. The ability of the internet to reach and interact with a global audience is more powerful than any form of marketing that has come before it. Equal parts of technology and creativity drive all aspects of internet marketing including design, development, advertising and sales. Finally, the perennially instant feedback allows for constant and up-to-date alterations to a product and service which keeps it relevant and consumer-friendly.

Of late, internet marketing and social networking have been integrated with interesting results. For the purposes of this assignment we are to visit the Facebook site developed by our professor that is named MarketNet. Our charge is to identify opportunities for improvement and develop a web traffic plan that will draw more visitors to the site. This task offers two learning opportunities. First, we will garner authentic practice in contributing to a marketing plan and, too, we will collaboratively expand a site that will benefit graduate and undergraduate marketing students as well as ourselves. For lack of better wording -- what a great idea!

2.0 Target audience analysis

To develop this target audience analysis the Central Queensland University annual report was consulted. This offered a number of statistics that allowed a picture of our target audience to emerge. CQUniversity Australia is a public university with six locations. There were 20,000 students enrolled in approximately 100 programs in 2009. The student body is split nearly even between international and domestic students. There are several thousand adults in the Business Studies program across half a dozen campuses and 84% of graduates find immediate gainful employment in the field.

Statistical sources place Australia as eighth in global population use of Facebook. Fifty-five percent of users are female and the other forty-five are male. Thirty percent of those who use Facebook fall between the ages of 25-34 and nearly thirty percent are 18-24 years old. The final segment is the over 35 group and this has now become the fastest growing segment of all (SEO Sydney blog, retrieved 5/20/2010).

Dozens of studies and academic articles have been published on all aspects of the subject of social networking. One study found that "social networking sites are increasing attracting the attention of education and industry (Ellison, 2007) and scholars from all fields are actively working to integrate them into daily experiences."

Recently, the focus has been on the emerging area of work-related research in the field of knowledge management and collaborative online communities. The first research project we will consider on the topic "applied social networking features to support an effort to train and improve the skills of the employee in a company, and facilitate the creation and reuse of knowledge in online communities" (Neumann, Murcho, Breslin, Decker et al., 2005).

The most germane point made in the aforementioned research study was that "they provide automatic inference of common interest and experience of members through logical reasoning and hence offer services and resource identification to solve tasks arising in the community" (Neumann et al., 2005). When this concept is applied to the development of a site devoted solely to the needs and wants of marketing students several thoughts become immediately apparent.

First, this specialized adaptation of social networking sites that are devoted to a specific subset of the population hold great promise of success. Second, one cannot help but be impressed by the sense of community and collaboration that is an automatic component of social networking in general and specialized Facebook pages in particular. Finally, it just makes good old common sense that people want to communicate and associate with others of the same ilk. MarketNet has the potential to be a relevant and supportive milieu for marketing students at Central Queensland University Australia.

Let us consider a second journal article on the topic of social networking. In this the researchers attempted to demonstrate the "relationship between a student's college experiences and price and quality, the knowledge acquired, the economic utility of a business degree, image, as well as social and emotional value, are important drivers of value in business education" (LeBlanc & Nguyen, 1999).

LeBlanc went on to say that "when comparing value judgements on the basis of gender and year of study, the results show that male students are more inclined to focus on social value and females are more critical of the price/quality relationship as it relates to value."

The most disheartening point of all in the research was that as any student progressed through their degree program they were less convinced of their ability to command a good salary in the field of business overall. The relevance of this information is that it was gathered through social networking sites -- which serve as a concrete example that they are a destination for young people today -- and a great resource for researchers attempting to quantify a hypothesis.

In all nearly twenty sources were consulted to help develop a more crystallized picture of the relationship between social network sites and their uses in education. In this case, we're all in new territory as new adaptations are discovered and incorporated into the world of academia thereby enriching the academic experience for the student. The most exciting point of all of this is that too little is known to set limitations -- the sky's the limit on how to utilize social networking in education -- and exceptional results are expected.

3.0 Web traffic plan

The development of a web traffic plan is an essential component of any internet marketing campaign. In this case the goal is to encourage the university students to participate and utilize the MarketNet site. There are a great number of options available to the novice and expert marketing person to increase web traffic to a site -- even when there is a severely limited or nonexistent advertising budget. We will first define goals that can be met without the need for money.

Strategy one -- professional collaboration

Although it was suggested that word of mouth be a consideration in developing a web traffic plan that would seem to me to be a disorganized and ineffective approach to developing a successful web traffic plan. Instead, yy first objective would be to harness the full support of the business faculty on all six campuses. The professor who has spearheaded this project should make it an agenda item at staff meetings at each location.

Perhaps a single meeting could be held using distance learning technology that would allow for real-time collaboration and brainstorming. There are several tactics that should be agreed upon and immediately implemented. First, all marketing professors should include the website somewhere on any and all correspondence with students. This would include syllabi, letters and maybe even tests. It should be introduced during the first class of each semester and its use integrated into the material throughout the months of the class. Professors should assign homework that requires a student to utilize the site as a resource.

When professors promote the website then traffic should increase dramatically. In the end, the Facebook site is expected to be an invaluable tool for students as they job hunt, share information and simply socialize so there is no reason that marketing teachers shouldn't lead the way towards its use. Finally, people are always sharing the URLs of websites for one reason or another. This organized effort to build an online community designed exclusively for marketing students should bring immediate and positive results.

Strategy two --… READ MORE

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