Over the years, the United Arabs Emirates has evolved greatly with technology and has become an e-commerce hub. Compared with some of the top European Union States, the country is at the same level in terms of basic online services. These services have been promoted by the increasing number of markets and the growth of social media which many people are now familiar with it. Moreover, SMEs are growing at a fast rate and people are using it to market their products, to sell and also to interact with customers and suppliers. This has greatly influenced the number of sales online. PayPal has been a great platform for transactions across the world. Online transactions have led to improvement in logistics, increase in security during transactions, good payment execution and speed in technology. This essay intends to introduce our company and evaluate different e-marketing strategies available and to develop a detailed marketing plan using 7 steps marketing plans pertinent to our company and also to state the pertinent marketing tools used to promote our online.
Our business is called Ramesh Promotions. More information about it is found at www.rameshhelp.com. It is an e-tailing business whose main purpose is to give information about hotels and their prices. This enables the customers to easily get hotels to take meals, spend time or hold meetings. Our physical office is based in Dubai, al mathaf street. The main area of concentration is fashionable clothes and accessories. Any interested client can either visit our shop or order their preferences online. Our business has been licensed by the Department of Economic Development (DED) and as is legally required, we have a physical office. We also have a website as put above, which was prepared naturally and approved. Our mode of payment is cash on delivery to give our customers ample time to decide the kind of products they would love to purchase. We also accept credit card payments and pre-paid card systems.
The Marketing Plan
1. Situation Analysis
Considering Dubai is a great tourist attraction center, most tourists would want a place to take their meals and spend their time to rest before they continue with their tour in the city. Our company has satisfied the legal factors such as consumer protection, trade regulations, and restrictions. It has the purpose of providing healthy competition with other companies and not becoming a threat. Our environment is good as the level of consumer awareness is great. Our clientele has access to modern technologies and is aware of the current trends in technologies such as accessing websites and online payments thus can easily access our services. Our esteemed customers can clearly perceive the benefits of our services as they do not have to struggle to look for places to rest. This gives us the confidence to continue with our project.
SWOT analysis
Our strengths include; we offer a larger selection of places as compared to others, our prices are lower, we are easily accessible and our services are available all the time.
Weaknesses include the difficulty in pointing out places due to misunderstandings. Some clients mishear or misinterpret street names leading to them going to wrong places. This will lead to customers blaming us for wrong directions.
We have made good use of opportunities like social media. This is a platform where many clients look at. We also do live chats for quicker responses and our customer service is very friendly.
Our threats include the possibility of government increasing internet tax yet what we get from one client is not much. This might shake our business by reducing returns. It might also give our competitors a chance to thrive more.
2. E-marketing Strategic Planning
The demand for hotels is high because of the high number of tourists in the city. Therefore, the supply too will be high. The people in the city too are mostly educated and with good income thus would want to sometimes spend their time outside their homes. It is therefore with no doubt that the business will make profits (Strauss " Frost, 2016).
3. Objectives
The purpose of this business is to help people searching for hotels get them faster by giving them a list, the prices, the environment of the place and what to expect. This will enable the customers to choose easily. Our services are done instantly as all one needs to do is to click on our website and choose from our list. We also aim at increasing positive comments about our city, increase sales revenue, reduce costs and achieve customer relationship management goals.
4. E-Marketing Strategies
Strategies help in achieving the objectives of the business. The product should be advertised in various ways to increase the number of prospects. One may decide to use social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Skype, their website, search engine optimization or even physical billboards.
The prices should be put in such a way that it entices customers. It should neither be too high nor too low. Moreover, one may decide to bid the price with the customer in order to make more profits because customers’ price differs. Marketing the business directly to the customers can also help increase the number of clients. Other things to also look at include marketing strategies and relationship management strategies.
5. Implementation Plan
Our main service is to enable customers to get hotels of their preference easily through our website. We have a selected few portals that promote and sell our services. Our target audience is mostly the tourists though we also have a number of locals. Social media is our main platform for marketing and promotion. We never fail our clients intentionally because our sole purpose is to deliver our services diligently.
6. Budget
Our budget is well put. We have platform fees, operational fees, and update fees. These fees will at least cater for web hosts, domain, office space rental, payroll, salaries, miscellaneous and other business taxes in case the returns in the business are not that good. We plan to reach up to 5 million clients in the next 5 years in order to help maintain our expenses. The purpose of our budget is to develop cost analysis, ROI calculation, Internal rate of return (IRR) calculation and Return on marketing investment (ROI) (Turban, Outland, King, Lee, Liang " Turban, 2017).
7. Evaluation Plan
We have a monthly evaluation plan that helps us track the results and know how our business is fairing. Some of our metrics relate to our specific plan goals. Our firm is Return on marketing investment (ROI) driven.
E-marketing Strategies
In any business environment, it is expected that the business is being marketed or people may think less of the company. After all, the marketing strategies are very accessible, they are never complicated. Also, they are very affordable as not a lot of money is needed on any of them. They are moreover valuable and time-sensitive as they offer high potential returns meaning if you invest in them, you will feel the potential and the more you invest in them, the more powerful your business becomes.
Personal branding is essential. This will enable an entrepreneur to look more trustworthy and creates a positive personal image thus improving the brand of the business. With positive reviews, one usually gets the confidence to meet other businesses and work with them. Undoubtedly, this creates a momentum for the growth of the business.
Content marketing is another strategy. It comes in many forms and it all depends on how one forms their strategy. Some forms include the use of white papers, ebooks, and other long-form content to attract downloads, or you can apply a blog to attract a lot of traffic to the site, or better still, it can attract signups and conversations. Content marketing is a wonderful strategy, very versatile and largely useful. Some content marketing tools include; Quora, BuzzSumo, HARO, and Medium.
Moreover, there is Search engine optimization (SEO). This involves making one’s site more visible so it can attract more traffic. The more the traffic, the more the sales. It is worth trying, as it does not involve a lot of investment especially if there is new content created regularly. SEO tools include; Ahrefs, Seobility, Long Tail Pro, SEM Rush, Pitchbox, and SEOquake. There is also Conversion optimization whose purpose is to create value from anyone that visits your site thus one way of improving it is creating more conversion opportunities.
Social media marketing is also a great strategy. It involves technologies that are computer-based. It helps in facilitating new ideas, sharing information, ideas, career interest or other forms of expression. One can make use of platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Skype, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Planable and many more to market their businesses. It creates a significant difference as the social media has a lot of audiences that can be potential buyers. One's content is the considering factor as it will either attract the audience or fail to attract them. If it does, then the business will stand to gain a greater brand visibility, a greater reputation and a lot of traffic with the syndicated links (Chaffey, 2015).
Moreover, there is Email marketing which costs almost zero investments to execute. One can start off by collecting subscribers from the existing customer base, followers from social media and other new opportunities, and this can keep your brand going forward. Through email marketing, one can easily create good traffic thus facilitating more engagement with their brand and keeping their audience. Some email marketing tools include GetResponse, MailChimp, ActiveCampaign, and SendinBlue.
Lastly, Pay Per Click Tools is a great model of promotion. It involves an advertiser paying a publisher when the ad is clicked. Some Pay Per Click tools include; Optimizely and OptimizePress.
Generally, e-commerce is convenient and can broaden one’s brand. Conveniency comes in in that e-commerce can fit into the busy lives of the customers by giving them the products that they want and anytime they want them. It also diversifies one’s sales. E-commerce is therefore essential in our daily life.
References
Chaffey, D. (2015). Digital business and e-commerce management. Pearson Education Limited.
Strauss, J., " Frost, R. D. (2016). E-marketing: Instructor's Review Copy. Routledge.
Turban, E., Outland, J., King, D., Lee, J. K., Liang, T. P., " Turban, D. C. (2017). Electronic commerce 2018: a managerial and social networks perspective. Springer.
