Study Modern Marketing Online
- Explore opportunities for business and career
- Start studying anytime, work at your own pace
- Study from anywhere
- Develop a foundation, to understand the subject, but also what is required to stay up to date and in front of the competition in the field of marketing
Learn to promote and sell goods and services using the internet. The internet has changed the face of marketing world wide. Many businesses have been struggling to adapt. Some have down sized, others collapsed. Others who have seen technology as an opportunity, rather than a problem have adapted and thrived.
This course lays the foundation for a fresh approach to marketing, where opportunities are plentiful.
Course Structure
There are six subjects to be completed, as outlined below. Fuller outlines of each can be found by clicking the links or seeing below.
Modules
Note that each module in the Qualification - Certificate in Web Based Marketing is a short course in its own right, and may be studied separately.
Marketing Foundations
This 100 hr module helps you to understand the marketing world and make decisions about marketing, based upon placed on profitability and efficiency. There are 10 lessons in this module as follows:
1. Marketing and the Business
2. Scope of Marketing
3. Target Marketing
4. The Marketing Mix and Managing the Marketing Effort
5. Product Presentation and Packaging
6. Promotion
7. Product Pricing and Distribution
8. Customer Service
9. Market Research
10. Organisations - Structures and Roles
E Commerce
Develop an ability to manage commercial transactions electronically; particularly through the internet. While the module is concerned with management, processing of orders, and other aspects of electronic commerce, the primary concern is with marketing.
There are eight lessons in this module as follows:
1. Introduction –What is e-commerce …more than just the Internet!
2. Success & Failure –What makes the Difference?
3. Promotional Strategies –are different on the internet
4. Optimizing Web Site Potential
5. Increasing Web Site Exposure
6. Automating Supply of Goods, Services and Cash flow
7. Managing Constant Change
8. Dealing with E Commerce Problems
Internet Marketing
This module develops a capacity to use social media and other applications for marketing on the internet.There are 8 lessons in this module as follows:
1. Scope and Nature of Social Media
2. The Psychology of Internet Marketing
3. Social Media Applications
4. Websites, Advertising and Other Applications
5. Capturing and converting customers
6. Creating and Using Content
7. Blogs and Newsletters
8. Developing an Internet Marketing Program (PBL Project).
Information Security
There are 11 lessons in this module as follows:
1. Introduction to Information Security
2. Information Security Ethics
3. Data Integrity and Backing up
4. Vulnerabilities of Operating Systems and Information Systems
5. Risk Management
6. Information Security Technologies, Developments and Initiatives
7. Physical Security
8. Developing a security Policy
9. Implementing and revising a security policy
10.Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Planning
11.Information Security Maintenance
HTML
This course provides sufficient training for you to start producing your own HTML pages and publish them to the Internet. With a fundamental understanding of how this computer code works, you will have a foundation for learning more if you so choose; or communicating better with programmers if you are outsourcing programming work.
There are eight lessons in this module as follows:
1. Getting Started
2. Page Layout
3. Navigation
4. Images and Page Weights
5. Colour and Style
6. Designing a Web Site
7. Building and Testing a Web Site
8. FTP
Graphic Design (available soon)
There are ten lessons in this module as follows:
1. Scope and Nature of Graphic Design
2. Design Fundamentals (line, tone, colour etc)
3. Colour Theory and Applications
4. Typography
5. Illustration -methods & techniques
6. Logotype Design
7. Layout Design
8. Design Systems and the Design Industry (design briefs, how to bid for jobs, etc)
9. Comparative Design -Lessons From Other Designers (lots of research)
10. Design Project - A practical project applying everything prior to this.
HISTORY OF INTERNET MARKETING
The internet is gradually replacing many of the "traditional" information sources in society - printed magazines, newspapers, journals, TV and radio, books, conferences, seminars, professional associations. These mediums still exist, but where they are not replacing them, the internet is also supplementing them.
In the past a business might have had a printed catalogue; now they might have a printed catalogue plus an online store, or only an online store, or an online store and an online catalogue, or an online catalogue only, but not an online store etc. So the way a business uses the internet to sell their products and services does vary according to how the business itself works.
Considering how much business is done on the internet, it is hard to believe how relatively young the internet is. The history of internet marketing is very short, but revolutionary.
The internet began as ARPANET – The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network which was a “packet switching network” funded by the US Department of Defense. There were a number of other companies working on packet switching programs at the time (1960-1970) but the work by Arpanet allowed multiple networks to be joined together.
In 1982 a number of internet protocols were put in place as guidelines for how data should be transmitted, addressed, routed and formatted. Commercial internet service providers began to emerge in the late 1980’s and 1990’s.
In 1994, spending on the internet was virtually zero - by 1995 it was over $300 million. Today – many hundreds of billions of dollars is spent globally purchasing things online and along with this spending, marketing on the internet has exploded. It is hard to find a business or organisation that does not have some form of online presence today.
The internet was not considered to be a marketing or advertising medium when it was first introduced in the 1990s. It was mainly considered as a place to exchange emails or information in digital form. It was not really considered to be a way to reach potential customers and to make money. But marketing pioneers quickly saw the potential for online marketing with millions of people surfing the internet daily to find useful and relevant information. Obviously it offers businesses a huge potential market.
Shortly after the onset of internet communication, banner advertisements (situated at the top or bottom of a webpage) and adverts situated to the side of a webpage or even within a body of text, appeared. These can be either full colour graphics or text for example:
It’s going to rain heavily all month in Seattle, why not click here to buy a great new umbrella!
The customer, who may have looked online to view a weather forecast, might then end up buying an umbrella.
Early internet advertising instigated a flood of sales and as more and more sales were generated, advertisers began to realise the potential of the internet market.
As well as advertising online, many businesses that had been direct marketing (via the postal system) began to realise that they could achieve the same by email, therefore reducing their spending on stamps, paper, envelopes, labour etc. A thousand emails could be sent out at the click of a button - and business owners could compare this to the time and materials that were required to send out one thousand letters. The results were obvious – more businesses opted to inform their customers via email.
The change in communication then led to businesses (big and small) spending money to market their products online. This became huge business for search engines such as Google and Yahoo as they began to make significant profits just on advertising alone.
The internet has also allowed the opportunity for many people to start their own businesses – big and small – via the internet. eBay, the auction site which allows people to sell goods online, started off as a way for people to get rid of things they did not want, until eventually it was also possible to run a business selling things on eBay.
People can now sell online, process payments online and market and advertise online.
As well as actual adverts appearing on the screen – there are also more subtle ways in which online advertising is presented.
The most recent techniques involve embedding the advertisements within the page so that you are tricked into reading them.
Weather in London 22nd July
Sunny and Bright
The cancer council recommends you get prepared with ABC Sunscreen.
No one knows how much the internet market will expand or how it will evolve, but it offers businesses an exceptional way to sell their products to, potentially, billions of customers!
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In 2000, people on the web were allowed to “turn off” disruptive flashing banner ads and many did.
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RISKS OF INTERNET MARKETING
There are, of course, risks to internet marketing. A firm may rely heavily on their internet marketing, but what happens if they cannot do this for some reason? What if the internet crashes? Servers and Websites can crash (all websites are sourced from a server).
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Server – A server is a computer program that runs to serve the requests of other programs – the ‘clients’. So it performs computational tasks on behalf of these ‘clients’. A server is most commonly used to refer to a physical computer that acts as a host – running one or more services to serve the needs of other computers/users on the network. So you can have print servers, web servers, gaming servers, mail servers, file servers, database servers and so on.
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If the server crashes for any reason, then it can lead to the website crashing. Servers and computers can go down for a number of reasons, such as:
· Phishing – this is when there is an electronic attempt to access people’s information, such as email addresses, names, bank account numbers, passwords and so on. If a website is attacked by hackers or phishing attempts are successful, a business may have to close their website temporarily.
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Hacking – Hacking actually has two definitions. Originally a hacker was someone who used computers by profession or for fun. Now it has come to mean someone who breaks into the computer systems of others.
Phishing – Phishing is the theft of personal information such as email addresses, personal information, and finance details. It is usually done by spoof emails or fake hyperlinks.
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· DoS or DDoS stands for Denial of Service attack or Distributed Denial of Service attack – this is when individuals try to prevent intended users from using a website. For example; hackers might attack abcboxesandbuttons.com, so that their customers are not able to access the website and they are not able to sell their products. This is usually done for malicious purposes.
· Viruses – viruses act on computers in the same way as they act on the human body – they prevent the computer from working correctly. So a virus can destroy a website or infect other computers that come into contact with it. It can be very difficult to remove viruses from websites.
· Fire/flood - although most servers will have a backup or ‘cloud’ (this is used by many businesses as a means of backing up data), a copy is sent via your network to an offsite server hosted by a third party, in other words not the business’s usual service provider. The service provider offering the back-up cloud service charges a fee appropriate to the amount of band-width used or based on capacity etc.
· If a lot of people are looking at a particular website at a certain time, it can slow it down. For example, say 1000 people are trying to buy a blue box on abcboxesandbuttons.com, there may be delays as the website tries to cope with multiple orders. This can lead some customers to get frustrated and leaving the website.
· Updating – when a website is updating, it can slow down the processes.
· Hacking - what if a site is hacked? A site can be hacked and false information put online, false links leading to different pages where a person can buy false (or even non-existent) products and so on. So a customer may think they have made a purchase from a specific business – they may have paid for the product but it may never be delivered. The hacker has redirected the customer to their site and the customer has deposited money into their account instead of the business they thought they were buying the product from. These sites naturally appear and disappear very quickly.
