How Has the Internet Changed Marketing Strategy?

The answer is that changes have been great, but I don’t know of anyone who has verbalized the changes in a specific way. I’m going to cut off a chunk and give it a try.

I like to try to boil what we do as marketers, which often gets pretty complex, down into simple concepts. As far as I’m concerned marketers basically do three things. We acquire customers or sales leads. We convert leads into actual customers. We retain existing customers. There are many things we have to do in order to accomplish these three key goals. In addition, marketers of frequently-purchased consumer goods and services and some lower-priced business goods and services may not be in the lead conversion and generation business. With those provisos customer acquisition, conversion and retention form the core of what marketers do.
Internet 1.0 changed all those activities irrevocably. As this blog has often pointed out Web 2.0 is already here and the requirements for marketers are changing again before we fully came to grips with Web 1.0. This is a good time to sit back and try to organize the changes we know about into a simple, understandable form.

So, over the next couple of weeks I’m going to write a series of four posts, with this being the first. In the second I’ll discuss customer acquisition. Then over a few days I’ll write about conversion and then retention.

I keep being reminded that many of us who are now in the higher echelons of marketing were educated in traditional mass media marketing and it’s hard to get away from that and understand how fundamentally marketing has changed. Understanding the changes that have taken place--and maybe looking ahead a bit--is the purpose of this series of posts.

Please stay tuned!
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