2.1.1 Marketing Tools
Marketing tools are techniques and materials used for promotion of products and
services. Today’s marketing requires tools such as a web site, social media,
online advertising and promotion, email marketing. These tools implement the
main marketing aim that is building a profitable customer relationship. (Armstrong
2009.)
All these tools are known as a paid media.
Online advertising and promotion are tools that are integrated to the present
study and presented below. Advertising is an act of drawing attention to a specific
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product or service (Pant 2007). According to Harden (2009), advertising works
harder on the Web. Online advertising implements the same function as any
other advertising.
According to Armstrong (2007), online advertising consists of several different
forms:
Banners
Banners are display ads inserted in the web pages of the content site. The size of
the banners differentiates from long verticals to skinny horizontals. Usually,
banner ads contain links to the advertiser’s web sites. Also banners appear on
blogs and social media sites. In addition, banner is a chargeable form of
advertising. (Harden & Heyman 2009). Visuals examples of banners are
presented below.
Figure 1. Banner.
The presented figure shows the banner that is placed on a company’s website for
customers attraction. This banner advertises the page with cut-rate products.
This banner is very attractive because of its colour and varied pictures. The
visitors will definitely click to this banner.
Intertestials
Particular advertisements are displayed while the web page is loading
(Armstrong 2009). Figure 2 shows the visual example of interstitial.
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Figure 2. Interstitial.
Present interstitial appears during the loading of the Finland Plus website. The
given website is created for promotion of local stores. For having maximal
attraction, La Fiaba Store is ready to pay for this kind of advertisements.
Pop-ups and Pop-unders
Pop-up and pop-under are the most annoying forms of advertisement.
Nevertheless, these ads are very effective in drawing the attention of potential
customers. Pop-up and pop-under ads appear almost anywhere on a web page.
These ads appear until the user will close them. (Harden & Heyman 2009). The
visual example of a pop-up is presented below.
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Figure 3. Pop-up advertise.
This pop-up advertisement has the same goal as the previous interstitial. Cilek
Room is able to order the present advertise from the website that is concentrated
on the promotion.
Contextual advertising
Basically, contextual advertising is one more form of display ads. Contextual ads
are usually used as a private advertisement. These ads can be hidden through
the text. Users mechanically click the word that has a link. Usually these words
are marked by cursive or different colour. (Harden & Heyman 2009.)
Rich Media
Rich media is an advanced banner that integrates video, sound, animation and
interactivity. It is more expensive than other online ad forms. As an example rich
media advertisement can be presented as a graphics interchange format picture.
The example is presented below. (Harden & Heyman 2009.)
Figure 4. Rich media advertisement.
The present example introduces the video advertisement that is placed on the
official website of GoodPri Company. The aims of the given rich media advertise
is to visually show the advantages of the company.
Content sponsorship
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Companies promote themselves through various web sites. They pay for
exclusive ads, articles and posts. The most popular platforms for a content
sponsorship are blogs.
Microsites
This form of promotion is a partnership between two companies (Harden &
Heyman 2009). As an example, a shoes store has its own web site that is
providing a page with the information about Footwear Care Company.
Figure 5. Microsite.
As was mentioned earlier Finland Plus is a website that is created for advertising
and promotion of different Finnish companies. Figure 5 illustrated the microsite
that is placed on Finland Plus website in order to promote Cilek Room,
Lappeenranta.
Alliances
This form of promotion is known as an affiliate program. It is cooperation between
two companies that are promoting each other.
According to Harden and Heyman (2009), 55 percentage of Internet ad spending
goes to mix paid media, including banners, rich media, ad networks, sponsorship,
blogs and video ads. The benefits of online advertising are:
- Large audience - it means that the potential customer has open access to
check online advertises 24 hour / per 7 days.
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- Easy and cheap tracking - there are analytics tools that are used for
tracking the number of clicks and unique visitors.
- Direct sales – it is an opportunity to sale a product directly to the customer
without middlemen.
- Speed - the updates can be made in a few seconds.
Online advertising allows reaching a responsive audience and reviewing the
effectiveness by different dimension and metric tools such as Google Analytics.
Also online ads channels insert information in the shortest possible time.
Moreover, online ads give an opportunity for direct sales. As was mentioned
earlier, advertising is calling attention to the product or services while promotion
keeps the product or services in customers’ mind.
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