BUS602: Marketing Management

Website

A dedicated brand website is potentially the most powerful brand building tool. A company's website is a critical element of internet marketing and online activity. This is the company's second home online where customers and visitors can, at any time and from anywhere, visit and see the latest news, offers, or products.

However, if the website is designed poorly or not appealing to the eye, is slow and has unnecessary elements, or simply is unattended, it may bring more losses than benefits. In those cases, website visitors will have a negative opinion about the company and its activities, and it is very likely that in the future they might not revisit such page and even avoid the real shop.

Hill (2011) distinguished the following five key points to create a beautiful and user-friendly website:

Bar. Perhaps the most important part of the URL, poorly designed it can make a website completely unusable and eventually scare away visitors. It is very important to create something aesthetically pleasing, but not to overload the field of design. The simpler the design, the easier it will be to understand and manage the website.

Brand integrity of the company. If the company has developed and is developing its own brand, it is essential to incorporate it into a website design, as customers and visitors will associate website design together with the company's brand. This result also creates unified corporate brand integrity.

Text layout. Most people read a web page as they read a book, from top to bottom, and from left to right. During creation of a web page, the most important information should be made on the right top side, in order to help relevant and updated information be seen easily and immediately.

Content. The creation of a short and clear message makes it simpler and easier for visitors to read information, understand and remember it. If the page is overloaded with information, visitors may get lost, not understand where and what to read, may not remember the information they obtain, and may finally get tired of reading and leave the site. When writing text, remove completely unnecessary information, leave white space between rows, and make sure the text is easy to read on a screen. 

Trust. Creation of a website that is beautiful, accessible, and appealing to clients and visitors that meets the needs of web design, allows the company to form a larger and stronger sense of mutual trust. 

People will notice it immediately and positively assess it; the recovery will be felt in the enterprise. It is not enough to create a beautiful website; it is necessary to maintain a warm, pleasant and fast relationship between employees, the existing and potential customers.

Summing up, if the company has created a beautiful and well thought-out web page, with useful information, visitors will have a more positive experience. That in turn will contribute to the improvement of the image of the company. Some companies are improving their public image when existing customers provide positive feedback.

Advertising on the internet

According to Adjugler (2008), almost 15-20 years ago, when the internet had just started to spread and gain its popularity, the internet advertising space could be compared with advertising in the media. Customers bought advertising space in a desired site for a certain period of time and placed it without knowing whether the advertisement would interest visitors.

Advertising rates were determined by simply taking into account the advertising space and the average amount of site visitors, even without knowing whether they will see the ad or not. Traditional media usually follows the same principle, only the price is determined according to the market circulation.

Such advertising was and is very inefficient for attracting visitors and showing the prices, so advancing technology improved advertising opportunities. Over time more modern and efficient advertising appeared that allowed for a few changing ads in the same ad space, so it was possible to find out which ads were more interesting to visitors or completely uninteresting.

Later a "cost per thousand advertising principle" developed, a standard set of advertising cost per thousand website visitors where the advertisement was displayed. Over time, other payment models more aligned to modern times emerged, such as "cost per click" (pre-determined price for a click on an ad), and the number of clicks can be shown.

For a while, advertising became much more imaginative, with moving animations, etc. Modern software has become so sophisticated that it is able to provide advertising exclusively in a particular region or population to reach different target audiences, based on demographic data.

Although there are a number of promotional tools, the perfect tool for all advantages and disadvantages still does not exist. The use of promotional tools varies widely from the advertiser to the objectives and the audience, so this should also be taken into account.

According to Chan (2015), using both internet and traditional advertising contribute to the company's brand promotion and awareness-raising. The author used the present literature, confirming that internet advertising is an especially effective tool to improve the company's brand awareness.

According to him, the advanced modern internet technology allows internet users to apply only the most relevant and updated information on exactly what they need without any unwanted content. Using the latest and the most efficient analytical data processing programs, Internet users can get ideas on certain issues as well as understand and investigate their deeds.

Most importantly, all of this information comes from social networks, online forums or discussions. This allows businesses to provide the most important and most relevant content to consumers that meets their expectations in order to increase their awareness of the society companies can "run noise" in the Internet space. This can be done by creating a viral video or advertising widely throughout cyberspace in order to promote positive public feedback "word of mouth".

Social networks

Social media marketing involves the use of internet social media tools, such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn in order to reach consumers innovatively. Social networking helps to promote the company and its activities. Active social networks try to attract more new customers or visitors. People are always much more interested in engaging with corporate social networks, than just visiting their websites.

In social networks people can directly, very simply, and informally interact with a business, and create much stronger two-way communication. This enhances mutual trust and strengthens brand image, and eventually can increase corporate visibility. In order to achieve this, business social networks have to be particularly active, just as much or even more than their users.

Genslera, Völcknerb, Liu-Thompkins, Wiertz (2013) argue that the rise of social media and the associated possibilities of large-scale consumer-to-consumer interaction and easy user generation of content focus the spotlight on the importance of recognizing, and if possible managing, the multi-vocal nature of brand authorship advocated by the cultural branding view. Consumers in particular are more empowered by social media, as these technologies enable consumers to share their brand stories widely with peers.

The popularity of social networks (e.g. Facebook) have grown exponentially in recent years. Whereas once only few people knew or used social networks, nowadays almost everyone has and actively uses social networks.

Social networks are free - visitors do not pay for their activities in social networks, and benefits can be much higher than from ads.

Social networks enhance two-way communication. Users can communicate much faster and conveniently with companies via social networks, expressing their views and proposals.

Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, and LinkedIn are popular social networks. However, only a few of them can be analyzed as the most popular social networks, because some of them have not gained great popularity in Lithuania.

At the time of this study, Facebook in Lithuania is used by 68% of the population, 46% of which use it on daily basis. Meanwhile, the second largest social network Google+ is used by almost 27% of the population, only 8% of them use it regularly. Professional social network LinkedIn In Lithuania is used by almost 6% of the population. Other foreign popular social networks, such as Twitter, Pinterest, or Tumblr are not popular in Lithuania.

Facebook. Facebook's story began with a simple idea to create a single student's social network for high school students where they could easily communicate and share information. However, the situation has arisen that after the great success, Facebook has become accessible to everyone, no matter where they lived, worked, or studied. After several years it experienced great success, to the point where every fifth person in the world had a Facebook account.

When creating a Facebook page for your business, it is important to provide enough information about your business so people visiting your page can immediately be aware of what you do, know the company's working hours, etc. Be sure to include important information such as: the level of prices, the information about the service, product's range and their groups, payment methods, and contact information. 

It is also helpful to provide information about the company, such as its history, the services provided, its goals and values. It is advisable once in every few months to check whether the written information is correct and whether it is still relevant for that period. It may happen that the company has moved, or changed its working hours and contact information. Information should be presented in an engaging a way as possible. If it is too boring, you might risk losing potential customers. 

For creating a good and attractive page, it is important to provide:

• photo and a brief description;
  
• few sentences about some recent events;
  
• good knowledge of your business or local community;
• special offers, discounts or promotions (briefly and clearly);
• information about the company's announcement in press.
  

Table 2: Facebook Statistics

Google+. Google+ was created and managed by the company Google. Google is a California-based, multinational internet company, providing digital products and services, such as: online search and advertising, cloud computing, and software. In May 2015, Google was ranked first amongst the most visited multi-platform web properties in the United States with 242 million U.S. unique visitors and a market share of 64.2 percent among the leading U.S search engine providers.

Google's market capitalization in February of 2015 was valued at 370.2 billion U.S. dollars. Similar to Facebook and other social networks, Google+ allowed you to create personal or business accounts. People can share and look for the content as well as in all social networks.  Despite the similarities between these two social networks there are important further differences:

• Circles were considered the most frequently mentioned and the largest Google+ advantages and differences, compared to Facebook. Just like in real life, people could create their desired groups (such as family, close friends, relatives, classmates, co-workers, etc.) in Google+ network. They can also add the desired parties to one or more circles. All this makes you to share information only with certain individuals.
  "1+" - this is equivalent to Google+ Facebook "like" button. People clicking on this button show that they like the content.
• Human mention. Writing a comment or message and pressing + sign and immediately without entering the person's or company name, they will be automatically informed about their commemoration. This made it easy to share news or information to certain people, and companies could become much more active in communicating with the public or customers.
• "Hashtag". Makes it easier to find messages with a specific theme or content. Users create and use hashtags by placing the hash character (or number sign) pressing the # in front or unspaced phrase, either in the main text of a message or at the end. Searching for that hashtag will present each message that has been tagged with it.
• Hangouts. Online chat with Google+ users, where up to 10 people could participate. 
  

• Google: 67.5%
  
• Bing: 16.7%
  
• Yahoo: 11.6%
  
• Ask: 2.6%
  
• AOL: 1.7%