Marketing is about communicating your value proposition, not just to anyone who will listen, but more specifically to people who have a need that you fill. Using Internet tools and technologies for this task can allow you closer communication links with your target audience - segmenting your message to suit the audience in order to produce better results. This article introduces the top four ways in which Internet enabled forms of marketing should be used to spread your message.

1. Permission marketing with Email campaigns

Email marketing has become a mainstream, accepted method for communicating with your existing customer base. Additionally, many businesses collect email address through newsletter signup mechanisms. Gathering email addresses for your database doesn't need to be restricted to a newsletter sign-up though, customers who provide an email address and do not opt out should be added too.

It seems that lots of companies know that you can track your email campaigns with Google Analytics (GA), but not so many know how to do it or have actually tried to implement it. In this article I'll briefly explain how it works and all you really need to know to track most campaigns.

The premise behind tracking is very simple, instead of having a unique landing page for each marketing campaign, each marketing effort is tagged and tracked by its URLs.There are just three tags that are required for campaign tracking to work, you can learn about the optional ones here.

Marketing strategies incorporating information systems, such as email, social networking and media, search engines and websites may be classified as emarketing strategies. To develop an understanding of how your business might leverage information systems to support marketing efforts,  a series of approaches to marketing are first discussed here. Later in this series we will discuss various techniques to use technologies in your marketing efforts.

Mass marketing

The classical approach to marketing is an exposure maximisation strategyThe classical approach to marketing has been the exposure maximisation strategy of mass marketing. The more people that see your message, the more people buy your products and services. It is the one-to-all approach selling whatever you have to many people, with the expectation that there is a direct correlation between exposure and sales. This strategy has been relatively expensive in the past, using print, TV and radio based media to push the message out. As the communication phenomenon that is the Internet has begun to provide easier ways for marketing online, it has become a cheap method for distributing your marketing message.