Ch. 7 - Business Marketing

Submitting Product Feeds 

Retailers that sell products online should most definitely be using product feeds to reach a broader audience. A product feed is simply a file generated from Tommy Hilfiger that lists product details such as photos, descriptions, pricing and even specials. These product feeds can be submitted to shopping comparison websites, search engines and also made available to customers using feed readers.

 

Creating Newsletters

Newsletter and email marketing is key in keeping in touch with the customers we've manage to get in Tommy Hilfiger. It takes a lot of work to gain a customer. Why let them leave without offering a way to stay in contact?

 Joining Social Networks

Social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn may or may help  sell products but if that's where our customers hang out, maybe we should too. The blogs on these sites helps us keep in touch with shoppers, make announcements or feature new merchandise and promotions.

Ch. 8 - Segmenting and Targeting Markets

The purpose of marketing is to understand the customer and then be an integral part of the organization in using this understanding to maximize the companies sale's profits and markets. Companies create market managers who are responsible for understanding certain segments. When looking for target markets good questions like

Why do customers buy from us and not our competitor? 

How often do they shop for the type of products or services we sell? 

Do they prefer to buy online or in a physical store? 

How price tolerant are they? 

Are our products “must have” or simply “nice to have"? 

The questions help determine our marketing and sales strategies. 

Market Segmentation and Targeting 

Before we seek to understand our customers, we start with knowing the overall size of the market for the products we are selling. It helps identify our real target customer if we look at the total market. 

The next step is segment the market into similar buying groups. Look at submarkets by age, income, gender, location, or any number of other approaches. It may be difficult to acquire customers in any of those market segments if we try to attract all customers with online promotion or product line. 

The goal with market segmentation is to group potential buyers into a segment that is likely to have similar buying tastes and habits. Even that can be challenging. But there is a lot of free information on the Internet. We also evaluate competitive sites already selling into those markets by analyzing their demographics, traffic, and the types of search marketing strategies that they employ. 

Once we have identified discrete market segments, we selected one or more target markets to pursue. This process includes understanding what products those consumers are seeking, how they will shop, how much they are willing to pay, and so forth.