Never before as now the “Global Village” (Marshal McLuhan), the “Big Brother” (George Orwell) and the “Butterfly Effect” (Edward Lorenz) theories made so much sense. Indeed, Web 2.0, a term coined by O’Reilly Media, more precisely by Tim O’Reilly, in 2004, has contributed to the world shrink to the size of a small village, where all its inhabitants are constantly “monitored” and controlled and that any of their movement causes effects on the other side of the planet.

A “Brave New World” or “Chaos”? It’s too early for predictions, because, on the web, everything changes on the minute and we are still trying to understand the phenomenon. Remember when sending a simple e-mail was a novelty? Today, e-mail is the most used tool of communication in businesses! What about tools that favour the collective intelligence? In a very simple definition, we will say that Web 2.0 includes the full set of websites that grow in value through the actions of its users.

But how your company can take advantage of this phenomenon to boost its visibility and reputation? We will “travel” by the basic concepts, strengths and weaknesses of e-marketing.

This achieves more space in the marketing plans of the organizations and can be seen as a transposition of the traditional concept of marketing to a virtual plane. The e-marketing has enabled a greater interaction between businesses and customers, faster and cheaper, resulting in efficiency and profitability in its action.

Strengths:

Global Reach – many brands now use the web to internationalize, something that, using the traditional means, would be slower and more expensive;

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Reduced Costs;

Measurable Results (Tracking) – one of the key issues of e-marketing, because the Web provides mechanisms to assess directly the reaction of customers, with the use of statistical software and CRM (Costumer Relationship Marketing), which give the owner of the website; data on visitors and their navigation on the site and on the needs of consumers – the millions of forms on the Internet are used to this;

Marketing 24 hours – the information is available 24 hours/day;

Personalization – the perception of the preferences and needs (through statistics purposes, a time to visit a website, number of times you accessed a particular site, etc..), which enables campaigns one-to-one;

Creativity;

Interactivity and Immediate Response of Audience.

Weaknesses:

Global Competition;

Impersonal communication;

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Price competitiveness – the easy dissemination and transparency of prices, giving an increased competition in the price of goods or services to market;

Demanding consumers – access to a greater flow of information makes consumers more informed about the products or services they wish to acquire. The provision of feedback from other customers and the tools to compare products and offerings available are resources that influence the time of purchase, as consumers tend to believe more in the opinion of other consumers than the brand that is always ready.

It is thus that, as in a traditional marketing plan, the strengths and weaknesses of the various platforms available on the Web should be considered in drawing up a strategy for e-marketing. But is that all brands can be “sold” on the Internet? At the outset, no! Everything depends on the target audience and objectives to be achieved? Do the target customers of the Louis Vuitton are on Facebook or Twitter? And customers of a company of detergents to the floor? Before, the web has provided, to small and medium-sized businesses, tools to compete in markets where before it would be very difficult to compete. First, it reduces the barriers at the outset of his appearance, then it is an accessible means for transmitting messages of a commercial nature, fostering creativity with low financial and logistical resources.

We are interested in, therefore, address some of the concepts that the online medium brought to marketing:

Technical one-to-one

One of the criticisms that usually points to the digital medium is the impersonal relations. If we lost, a long time ago the personal treatment we received from the person at the counter in the grocery store, this feeling deepens when we doesn’t see who is even at the checkout. It was called this technique one-to-one, that is, the unique dialogue (because everyone is different) that happens between a company and a consumer, or, more properly, a group of consumers with similar tastes. To overcome this weak point, companies must create tools to mitigate the likely impersonality. Filipe Carrera, in his book “Marketing Digital 2.0 – What can not ignore,” argues that, on the web, the relationship “may even be stronger if we create tools and spaces for interactive communication” as assistant online, click to call and business virtual assistant (avatar).

Micro-segments

In the online environment, the promotion should be well targeted and more suited to the target market. With the volume of information that you can get over consumers (using databases and forms), the notion of segment shrank. Thus, the company can communicate with their consumers in a massed way, but, at the same time, in a personalize way calling the same custom needs of each group. Consumers feel that their preferences are known by the brand.

Virtual Communities

In web 2.0 you can engage customers in virtual communities. There are brands that involve their customers in designing their own products, making them joining groups where ideas are exchanged and where the brand is inspired to their further development of them. Software engeneers, for example, are lavish in creating virtual communities to develop open source software.

Permission Marketing

By SMS, e-mail, Internet and traditional media (newspapers, radio, television, billboards and many others) comes to us every day thousands of advertising messages that we do not want and automatically ignore, forgot or erase. The remote control television came exactly to avoid the publicity. Now comes the new concept of “Permission Marketing”, who appeals to permit the recipient to receive promotional messages, with greater success because if the campaign is well organized may have another effect – it also associated with web 2.0 – the viral marketing.

Viral Marketing

Viral Marketing in addition to spread like a virus, the most valuable asset of a viral marketing campaign is the potential low cost, because its success depends more of the creativity than the budget. Basically, based on the design of a message that motivates others to forward it to your network and that their contacts and so on until it causes an “epidemic”.

In conclusion, we can say that what essentially changed in marketing with the Web 2.0 is the introduction of a new P to the four that already exist on the so-called marketing mix – to the product, price, placement and promotion, joins the P Participation. In digital media, the consumer is a word increasingly important in the product, making it a Prosumer (producer and consumer).

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