.A marketer is interested in understanding how well his/her web site is meeting its strategic objectives of building company and brand awareness, and of moving site visitors from looking to buying. The company has some online competition that requires constant oversight and reaction. How might the marketer use the Internet to develop marketing intelligence to guide further marketing action?
a) Set the Stage
Develop an essay response that provides a hypothetical example of a company and its product, as well as its competitors.
b) Develop the Intelligence
Describe a coherent strategy for using the Internet to gather information and develop insights into site performance thus far. Discuss why you have chosen various methods for gathering online intelligence, including relative benefits and synergies.
c) Plan the Future
Present three (at least) recommendations about future directions for online activity, based on plausible outcomes of your suggested data strategy.
Available Data
Number of visits | 424 (42.4 visits/day)
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Number of unique visitors |243 (1.74 visits/visitor)
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Number of pages viewed |23,810 (56.15 pages/visit)
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This data reflects site traffic characteristics from the first ten days of business. Your job is to define a plausible type of company and product for these data, and then to develop a viable revenue model/s.
Some avenues to consider include money from advertising and money from sales. Obviously, deriving revenue from the former approach will entail justification for the numbers you use as the basis for your CPM’s. In the latter approach, be sure to consider such issues as your customer acquisition cost, conversion rate (i.e., how many visitors become customers), and your return on advertising investment.
One way to get started is to develop a basic outline, such as the following:
1. Company/product focus (i.e., what’s appropriate for this type of data – few visits, lots of site searching (e.g., a reference site, a car dealer site, or just a site that’s tough to navigate).
2.Website objectives (e.g., selling something? Providing content to build image?)
3.Stakeholders (e.g., customers, investors)
4.Market characteristics (e.g., given the type of market for your product, how do the available data indicate that you are performing? Does your site need fine-tuning? Is there any data collection that might be helpful?)
5. Possible business models and a rationale for the selected model. (Use the provided data to impose rigor on your thinking and assumptions.)