The Internet and the new face of Marketing
The Internet is fundamentally changing the way businesses go to market. There are over two billion people online – all connected, creating, communicating and looking for information. That’s a market that any business – large or small – can ill afford to ignore.
In the past it was difficult for small and medium sized businesses to compete with their more established national or international rivals because marketing was expensive – even on a trial basis. National newspaper and TV advertising were often only a reality for brands with a sizable marketing budget. For those smaller companies that could pay for traditional local advertising, this generated only local leads and limited their growth opportunities.
The Internet levelled the playing field. It cut costs so dramatically and transformed so much of what business is – from distribution and logistics to customer acquisition and service – that in many sectors, there is now no such thing as an established business. Think about how eBay re-wrote the rules for auction houses or the precedent set by companies like Expedia in the travel business.
Many factors have driven this change, but perhaps the biggest factor of all has been in the cost of marketing and acquiring customers. With Google’s search marketing, advertisers only pay when a user clicks their ad, meaning the model is fully accountable Even the smallest company, operating out of a garage in the middle of nowhere, can tap into new opportunities in a way never before possible, provided they have a website and a good product or service.
Google AdWords is helping to spawn a new generation of Nigerian companies. Take www.konga.com, which resumed sales of general merchandise and fashion items from its website one and a half years ago. With the power of search marketing, revenues have grown exponentially, achieving December 2013 sales greater than the whole of 2012 combined. There are thousands of success stories like this, from companies of all sizes.
The Internet has demonstrated very powerfully that no industry or business can afford to believe it is ‘established’ anymore, because an unknown operation can quickly become a key player. Search is increasingly the start point for consumers to find what they are looking for, so search marketing is a potent weapon in the arsenal of the modern marketer.
Credit
Taiwo Kola-Ogunlade
Google, West Africa
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