Internet marketing: A Road Map to success in the Indian Web-space

Abstract

Today, Internet marketing offers great opportunities for businesses. Marketing activities through online media vehicles allow companies to directly communicate with their consumers without time or location barriers. This adds the convenience of targeting ads to specific consumers which would be viewed by him/her at the comfort of one’s own personal computer. This has enabled Internet marketing to emerge as a topic of widespread interest for marketing agencies all over the world. Online advertising campaigns address consumers with individualized advertising messages at the various websites they visit. The underlying paper discusses its relevance in the context of the Indian web?space and investigates antecedents of consumer attitudes toward Internet advertising. The analysis is primarily based on the Hierarchy of effects model, applied here specifically in the Internet advertising perspective. Using this as a basis, few other models were developed and few factors were identified in order to explain the users’ behavior and attitudes towards online advertisements; and also to identify parameters which influence these aspects. As a result, relevant hypotheses were drafted and a questionnaire was developed. This survey was administered to a target audience in order to corroborate our hypotheses. Regression and Correlation were performed on the available survey data and the results have been analyzed and documented. Key insights that arise out of this study are that factors such Advertising value and a user’s attitude towards Internet advertising should be at the core of an online marketing campaign. These are substantially influenced by the actual content and format of the online ad, and hence it is extremely critical for a company/brand to pay utmost attention to detail while designing an online advertisement. Also it was observed that the target audience has to be carefully chosen as the audience differs across websites and hence the products are to be targeted specifically to different segments.