The focus of online marketing tools is on search engine marketing, social media and email marketing, such as those used by the sister company of the case company. This knowledge will be used in parts of the thesis related to Any-Lamp BV and Installatie Wereld. This means that a company in a Dutch market must have a good online marketing strategy to respond to the increasing number of online consumers.
This was one of the reasons for the thesis; to develop Installatie Wereld's online marketing, another is that they do not have a physical location, which makes online marketing extremely important. The end goal provides the case company with a proposal for online marketing that can increase the sales of Installatie Wereld in the long run. The algorithms offer customers items they might be interested in based on either attributes or customer behavior.
Another major disadvantage of e-commerce is the time where customers receive the goods and costs caused by shipping the goods and possible returns. Most of the internet usage starts with the user making a search in the search engine. In addition, 36% of search engine users believed that companies among the top results were the leading brands in their field, while this number was 3% smaller in 4 years earlier study.
These programs copied the contents of the web page into one large database, where the search engine would display the results to the searcher.
Clicks on pages
Clicks on 1st page results
The meta description appears in search results below the title, by most search engines Google is the expectation and tries to display the most relevant part of the page, showing some lines of content related to the search term. Search engines try to define the type of site linking to the page to determine the value of the link. Search engines give more value to sites that have a higher page rank than the site they link to and if the content of the page is related to the linked page.
As with internal linking, the search engine determines the content of the page by anchoring the link text. If the content of the linked page is not related to the page linking there or the anchor text is unrelated, the link will not have any positive impact. In keyword stuffing, companies add hundreds of keywords to meta tags, repeating the keyword over and over in the text or simply adding a lot of keywords to the bottom of the page.
Search engine advertising (SEA) is an advertisement with a link to the company's website, shown to an individual based on a search term or context on the web page. These ads can appear at the top, right or bottom of the organic search results, depending on a search engine. This score is multiplied by the company's bid for the keyword to determine the order of the ads.
Given that most people don't click on paid ads, businesses need to spend a lot of time getting a lot of search phrases to get the same number of visitors as in search engine optimization. This is achieved by proving the company's expertise and building opinion leader status in society, whose successful press can cite the company. These lists can be very successful if purchased from trusted agencies, but bad lists don't work often and can damage the brand's reputation.
One of the biggest problems in e-mail marketing is if the e-mail does not reach the recipient, which may be due to an incorrect e-mail address or the e-mail being classified as spam. Conversion rate tracks the percentage of customers who take required actions on the website and is used to monitor the effectiveness of the site. In qualitative research, the influence of the person conducting the research is higher as it relates to the interpretation of results and observations.
The size of the case company is only a small fraction of their sister company Any-Lamp. Most of the orders Any-Lamp receives are from private customers, making it an important aspect for the company.
Channels by generated traffic in %
Google again dominates this with 94.1% of all SEO visitors, leaving Bing, Yahoo and Ask with 5.9%. Then the next two main traffic channels were people who came directly by typing website address, with 10.5% of visitors and newsletter with 6.2% of visitors. The last major channel was via emails, with 3.8% of visitors, with marketing emails accounting for 93.9% of these visitors and visitors who came by clicking on the email signature in customer service e-mails, was 6.1%.
Social media generated only 0.7% of the traffic, mainly Facebook, as YouTube generated only 0.01% of all visitors' visits. Facebook had more than doubled the traffic percentage generated as of 2015, while YouTube has neither risen nor fallen. Figure 10, a summary of the amount of traffic generated by Any-Lamp across different channels, with the top five channels and others, linking to third-party websites, comments, and posts.
Sales is very similar to traffic, as with more visitors there are more opportunities for sales. The only difference with the amount of traffic is that the direct channel had the second largest sales, with 24.4% of total sales. SEO-related sales were third, with 18.6% of total sales, with Google having 91.3% of SEO-related sales, leaving the other three with 8.7%.
Fourth and fifth largest were the newsletter with 5.1% of total sales and emails with 4.1%, where marketing emails make up 91%. Conversion rates indicate the effectiveness of the marketing channel, as it indicates how many bought the product.
Channels by generated sales in %
Any-Lamp sees the success through any common outcome, such as new subscribers, positive feedback and turnover. Installatie Wereld's strengths are close cooperation with the sister company, quick decision-making and expertise about the products. For example, if Installatie Wereld decides to expand other market areas in Europe, Any-Lamp has already established webshops in 14 countries and can help with local problems, such as shipping to Norway.
With lighting products, Installatie Wereld can direct customers to Any-Lamp and vice versa with installation needs. The opportunity for Installatie Wereld would be the large target audience and a high number of internet usage and orders. According to KWR of all residential buildings are detached houses, which means a good opportunity for Installatie Wereld.
Threats to Installatie Wereld are said to be direct competitors, such as Elektrobode and Klusspullen, which have been on the market for some time and have built up a solid customer base and brand image (Wouw 2016a). Installation World can partner with Lampdirect to improve their SEO and set up newsletter marketing to improve brand and market coverage until they find a person for this job. The most successful marketing methods for Lampdirect seem to be search engine advertising and search engine optimization, as these generate 74% of all visitors and generate 61.1% of the total turnover.
This cannot be directly influenced by Installatie Wereld, as it is more about how well people know the company's brand and remember it. Although Any-Lamp is more business-to-business oriented than Installatie Wereld, they still have a large base of private customers, which should show in the social media performance. Any-Lamp didn't see worth this and that's why they update so rarely.
The author would recommend Installatie Wereld to implement SEO tactics in their marketing, as this is not related to the customer group, but how easily customers find the company. In the future, it would be good to study the advertisement results of the Installatie Wereld search engine as well, to compare how similar it is to the Any-Lamp version. Since the blog was already on the Any-Lamp site and Google Analytics tracks incoming traffic from other sites.
Do you believe that Any-Lamp BV and Installatie Wereld have the same customer base? Do you think that the same marketing methods as Any-Lamp BV can be used for Installatie Wereld to increase turnover?
