When focussing on competition through global website visibility, many challenges are faced by businesses using internet marketing. Although many challenges occur businesses have the opportunity to help overcome them. The challenges that business may have to deal with can include situations such as:
-Keeping pace with market and technological change:
Technology is always changing or updating to work better or maybe to look better, to attract more people etc. Nowadays technology is used nearly everywhere and has become very popular. Computers are one technology that is used for many, many reasons by millions of people throughout the world. The internet is very important and many functions within the internet are used and updated/added to the internet to make ‘life easier’. Businesses that are based online such as ASOS has a great advantage of using these functions but ASOS also are faced with the changes being made. Customers like to see things that are modern and ‘in with the trend’. Home pages for example are the first page people will see and it has to be importantly eye catching and highlighted in the right way. If the technology used behind computers is changed the employees will have to keep to the challenge and get trained to KNOW the changes and use it within the website. Also keeping up with the market is also vitally important which adds to the challenges that business; particularly online organisations have to deal with to achieve those aims and objectives. The market is changing all the time; people’s opinions are vital and different within age groups; where they come from; etc. Internet marketing helps achieve this by able to use forums, social networks, emails, other information located on the internet, competitors etc...Throughout the internet businesses are able to market research and also find what is needed and wanted by the public where business can add to their company. ASOS are based online, so most of their market research are done through forums, social networks etc and they use brands and make the most available for their customers by providing a huge amount of products and also including it all in the website.
-Problems of managing overload of market feedback/Challenge of more complex analysis/Challenge of revising marketing goals commensurate with organisation’s capacity to process feedback
Businesses that are situated online receive more customer feedback than any other businesses. Feedback can include compliments, complaints, and opinions on something; basically it can be about anything a customer desires to let the business know. Feedback is a very good way of marketing and most business appreciate customer’s opinions and ideas and use it to their full advantage to satisfy a customer. Internet marketing allows businesses to use this but many errors can occur such as the problem of managing the volume of individual/group customer profiles. As online organisation are seen globally and everyone has access and opportunity to write to the business the issue of many and overload of comments can become a concern when there are no response by the business. Business online are mostly in communication with their customer through the internet/online which shows that this overload of customer feedback can become a problem. ASOS can have this problem occur within the business but they have thought through it and makes sure that everyone is being answered to by having a staff always present to give back thoughts and comments immediately.
-Security of site information and payment systems
This issue is a big one, as security online is important. There are many unreliable sites that contain many viruses, hacker access etc. Online businesses are faced with this concern all the time as it involves customer’s personal details and also the businesses itself. Internet is not always trustworthy such as ‘others’ might be able to see or gain access to the site and the payment systems. This also leads to another challenge that business are faced with using internet marketing is...
-Low customer confidence in payment security
This is because some customers are unable to believe that they are giving their money to the right business etc. Customers are concerned about purchasing from the internet as they have to give out vital and most importantly heir personal details that can lead to other problems such as theft. Online businesses can only receive payment through customer’s credit or debit card which many people are reluctant to give. Also some people may have concerns of believing the products are ‘real’, undamaged and so on which adds to the challenges faced by online businesses today. ASOS is an online business that has security to ensure customers their safety but it will always be an issue with some individual which can lead to less sales and missing out on some customers and ASOS would find it hard to prove it also.
-Problems of channel conflict and ‘disintermediation’
This is another issue raised for businesses to be considered mostly for online businesses as problems can occur for suppliers to understand businesses wants in stock when using internet marketing. Also some conflicts can be arise between the suppliers and businesses and also cutting out the middle man in the supply chain can also lead to some conflicts.
-Challenge of linguistic/cultural sensitivity
This means that businesses may find it a challenge of offering many their site to be written in many languages for customers all over the world that do not have the ability to read English even though English is an international language. Also some cultural issues of customers can have an effect on businesses online. ASOS is open internationally and might lose out on few customers if they did not understand English as ASOS does not provide any language bar. To overcome this ASOS may face this challenge and include a language bar by maybe getting a linguist to create this on their website, so that customers are able to change the site to their suited language.
There are many challenges faced by businesses using internet marketing when focussing on the competition through global website visibility as some mentioned in detail above...there are also issues that occur such as:
-Challenge of delivering to the higher reliability expectations raised
This is a challenge to online businesses because for example if their website has many fancy features and looks admirable that impresses customers and gives them an impression of high quality goods and services from looking at a website customers will end up judging their business to be of the same high level where customers will end up relying on those businesses to deliver those expectations raised.
ASOS has created a website that gives customers the impression of high quality and their challenge is to deliver to the high reliability expectations raised by customers. They have faced the challenge by offering many delivery options and offer many high quality goods and also use the method of feedback from customers to know they have offered their best to the consumers.
-Problems of ensuring maximum access via ISPs and search engines
When businesses enter their organisation online with a creation of a website not many people will have the knowledge of knowing it is in the World Wide Web. This is the challenge faced by online businesses as it is important to be recognised to get people viewing the website. The challenge will be for them to get hits on their website so that it becomes more recognised. Also when customers/individuals enter a word on search engines that relate to the businesses, those businesses with many hits will determine the search engine to put their web address in the first few columns that also gets them to receive more hits.
ASOS has many hits and is well recognised by many people, but they still face this challenge even though they have used searched engines and feedback strategy and social network to get more hits day by day.
-Challenge of additional legal complexity
This is very important to overcome this challenge as all businesses have to abide by the laws given for them. For example there are laws that business stores have to abide such as selling tobacco or alcohol to those above the age limit. There are other laws also such as a shop window where businesses aren’t allowed to stick ‘inappropriate’ images, text etc; this also has to be abided by businesses online as they are not allowed to present some information, picture on their website a few examples of rules and regulations applied by the government for online businesses are such as: Sale and Supply of Goods and Service Act; Health and Safety Act etc.
ASOS has to face this challenge by making sure everything in their website is has nothing that is against the law and also when delivering the same needs to be done.
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Internet Marketing Strategy
Posted by: Account Deleted | 10/05/2011 at 05:10 PM