This mornings guest speaker was Fiona Hart from Palm. Fiona has worked for 15 years in Sales and Marketing and has been working with Palm to manage and market their online e-commerce store. Today she gave us a brief look at what palm do, how and online store works and what’s the best way to bring people to the store.
Palm are a company who specialize in pdas (personal digital assistants) which are ‘smart’ phones to you and I. They run palm, windows and web operating systems and have been around since the palm piolet in 1996.
Palm Phones
Their latest and most successful launch has been for the Palm Pre which hit our stores last autumn if I remember correctly and is available only on the 02 network. It’s direct competitor is the apple iPhone and although it has not seen nearly as good sales as the iPhone it is still quite an innovative and practical device. It’s big selling point over the iPhone being its capability to run more than one application at once meaning quicker and effortless navigation.
Working in e-commerce, Fiona’s Team Scope is to
- Deliver on a financial target and to help grow revenue.
- Create loyal and satisfied customers.
- Provide market intelligence to Palm.
A very interesting point Fiona made about e-commerce compared to traditional commerce was that by doing business online, they can use real time market analysis. This means that if they run a campaign or offer that isn’t doing so well they can reject it or change it to be more affective within 72 hours. This is opposed to printing posters or flyers, creating tv or radio ads or generally spending a lot of money on a marketing strategy that won’t work. It saves the company wasting a lot of time, money and plenty of effort. Definitely a plus side to e-commerce.
Fiona showed us a diagram of the process taken from when the customer orders the product to having it shipped to them to the merchant reciving payment. This is similar to the diagram she showed us:
Online store
A lot of Fionas talk was about marketing and how to get people to visit and shop at their online store. Search engine optimization being one of the best ways for them to advertise because 85% of people use search engines to navigate their way through the internet. Another popular way is by search engine advertising which is when the company pays to have their link close to the top of the search results. There are many more ways of online marketing but I would be here all day talking about them so instead I shall show you another diagram which highlights some other ways.
Online Marketing
This is some info i found about digital advertising from the state of the net issuse 16.
Digital advertising:
Digital advertising will be the third largest medium in Ireland in 2010 and grow by 9% compared with an overall advertising market decrease of 7%, according to management consultancy Billetts.
As forecasters go, Billetts has a better class of crystal ball than others, as it audits budgets for major advertisers. The consultancy puts a value of €86 million on Irish digital advertising in 2009 giving it a market share of 10.6%, on a par with radio. Billetts reports that online classifieds took a “huge hit” last year, with revenues halved, but search performed well and is now the largest category within online.
In the UK, the most recent IAB statistics for the first half of 2009 show online as the largest single category, with a 23.5% market share. Similar research is to be commissioned in Ireland this year from PricewaterhouseCoopers by the relaunched Interactive Advertising Bureau Ireland (IAB Ireland). This is widely predicted to accelerate the growth of digital advertising in Ireland at the expense of traditional media.
Fiona told us about a successful online marketing campaign for ‘will it blend?’ so i thought i would throw it in for fun.
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