1-Click Marketing Blueprint Formulation using Web Mining

1-Click Marketing Blueprint Formulation using Web Mining

Abstract

This paper proposes an idea in which a marketing application will help us to create the whole marketing blueprint using just a click. With the evolution of the world, the success of the product now not only depends on the quality of the product but also depends on how well the company is able to market their products and bring it to the masses. The day has arrived wherein the public will know about the product when it is marketed in a way that it reaches the masses and is accessible to the targeted customer. But the issue with marketing is that we need to market research before formulating a plan and implementing it. In this system, we will create a marketing blueprint with just couple of clicks and present a proper strategy as the output which will be categorized based on the industry, budget and type of marketing(online and offline).

Keywords:

Marketing, Automated Marketing, Web Mining, Strategy Formulation, Web applications.

1. Introduction

   For corporations that sell products or services to public, formulating proposals is an important part of the efforts that are invested in the development of marketing and the business. In fact, creating marketing proposals is one of the most important and crucial job for the corporations that needs to sell its products or services to the masses and make the product appeal to its target audience. Marketing is needed to create awareness about the products or services. These marketing proposals are essential to the success and

   growth of the corporation. Better marketing proposals creates awareness about the products or services among a wider target audience, helps in influencing them which in turn increases the number of customers for the corporation, thus enabling financial growth and success for the respective organization.

   In this world of fierce competition, marketing helps in increasing the brand value of the products or services presented by the organization and distinguishes it and makes it more attractive to the masses as compared to its competitors. This helps in influencing the target audience and the growth of the organization.

   Proposals, then, are a special form of sales presentation. Their purpose is to convince agency that their companys product or service is the best one for the public to purchase. In this system we help marketing managers create blueprint with just couple of clicks.

   1. Background

      Before we start discussing about various aspects of our proposed system and idea, its important that we discuss couple of terminologies discussed in the paper and also look at various marketing chronic facts and figures.

      1. What is marketing?

         Wikipedia defines marketing as The action or business of promoting and selling products or services, including market research and advertising.[1] Whereas Webster defines marketing as Marketing is an activity.

         Marketing activities and strategies result in making products available that satisfy customers while making profits for the companies that offer those products.

         Although marketing has been in use to promote products for ages but the first time it was defined properly was in year 1561 when Oxford Dictionary published a updated edition with Marketing Word added into it.

         The core marketing concepts are:

         • Target markets and segmentation.

         • Supply chain.

         • Needs, wants and demand.

         • Marketers & prospects.

         • Product offering and brand.

         • Marketing program.

         • Relationship and network.

         • Marketing channels.

         • Marketplace, market space and metamark

         • Competition.

         • Marketing environment.

         • Value and satisfaction.

           This way, the term marketing became main stream as more and more people started using various tactics to gain user attraction and at the end, marketing is what people termed it as.

   2. Related Work

      The paper Automated Proposal preparation technique using a Marketing Text database. [2] authored by Katherine Hubbard and Joyce Campbell published in 1988 issue of IEEE TRANSACTIONS OF PROFESSIONAL COMMUNICATION discussed this idea in brief, they used a database text retrieval system to grab the data and analyse it and present it but the drawback of this system was that it was a generalized technique wherein ever industry was given the same proposal based on their budget irrespective of its industry category and target audience and in our proposal we eradicate this drawback and create a system or database which will be based on industry category, target audience and also budget. Apart from this our system will also present the proposal in a Portable Document Format (PDF) and this proposal can then be presented to respective clients and other higher authorities.

2. Current Marketing Scenario

   Currently the process of creating a marketing strategy involves manually researching about the competitors, past experience, past marketing data and current demands of the public. But the issue with this technique is that creating marketing strategies requires lots of planning. It requires great amount of money, time and human resources. For instance, a large company that spends millions of dollars but doesnt get its desired return of interest while a small or a medium enterprise spends only thousands of dollars but gets more than its desired return of interest, this difference is because of the strategy and marketing implemented by both the companies.

   In order to solve this problem, it is necessary that the company is able to formulate the marketing strategies properly and implement it accordingly. This requires research of the competitor which itself is time consuming and not feasible, money and human resources. To save the time and resources of the company, we, as a team are creating an application. Prior research will be done and according to the budget of the company and its target audience, the application will formulate the strategies, be it for online or offline marketing, using researched data and web mining concepts.

   The strategy formulation will also be dependent on the type of industry; the strategy formulations for a medical industry will be different than that of an airline industry. Based on the category of the industry, their budget and the target audience, the application will formulate strategies for both online as well as offline marketing depending on the requirements of the company. Thus, this application will reduce the overhead cost for research and will also save time, money and human resources that are indispensable to the company.

3. Issues with current system

   The environment or the market for the products is complex, with dozens of different platforms that connect with each other to present the product as well as customers supplier networks and marketing managers. These strategies should be authentic and relevan. A strategy can be considered worthy if people are talking about the organizations products or services

   and even recommend other people to use it. The chances of getting the marketing strategy successful are less than 5% [4], and with the amount of money and time involved, its highly risky. To reduce this risk, we will make a web application which will do the prior market research and present a marketing proposal to the end user just by using a couple of clicks. This includes our own prior research about the market demand, market needs and the audience involved and we will analyse these raw data and make

   an algorithm to present the proposal.

4. Proposed Idea

   Figure 1. Flow Diagram

   Figure 1. Flow Diagram

   The concept behind this system is that we will collect data from various online and offline resources and store it in a database and also for some specific advertising options we will make use of various Application Protocol Interface[API] such as Google, Facebook ads and Youtube ads API and this information will be stored in a database. The data thus collected will act as a data mart from which we will retrieve specific information. The information collected will be industry specific.

   Figure 1. Flow Diagram

   There will be an application in which the user has to select the category of industry for which the marketing blueprint is required. The user then selects the budget and the target audience. The user also selects whether the marketing blueprint is required for online or offline marketing or both. Based on the budget, target audience and industry category, data is processed from the database and formulation of marketing blueprint is done. This blueprint is then presented to the user in the form of a PDF.

   1. Modules of Proposed Idea.

      The idea is basically divided into 5 modules based on the user input viz. Category, Budget, Objectives, Type of marketing.

      1. Categorization

         As Wikipedia defines categorization as a group of things arranged by class or category, so accordingly we have categorized the marketing system based on the domain of company that the end user is working with. This may include Automotive, Banking, Manufacturing, Real Estate, Telecommunications, Electronics, Education etc.

      2. Budget

         In the world of start-ups now, we cannot expect everybody to have million dollar budget for their marketing needs, so it was necessary for us to decide on this, as a million dollar marketing blueprint will look a lot different than a $1000 marketing blueprint.

         So, accordingly we bracketed the whole system in 10 sub budget ranging from $1000 to $ 1 Million.

      3. Marketing Type

         Marketing can be done in 2 way viz. Online and Offline which can help end user achieve various goals according to the need. So we made sure that user can easily select the option and the system will analyse it accordingly and provide a well formatted output

      4. Objectives.

         Each marketing strategy has different marketing objectives, some have Social Reach as the main target whereas other has Brand Reach whereas just leads generation is important. So according to end user needs, he/she can select the marketing objectives and get the desired output.

         Objective area	Example objectives
         Maintaining or increasing market share	Achieve revenue growth of 15% per year for the next four years increase our market share by 4% by 2015, improve the online order conversion rate from 65% to 75% by 2011.
         Developing new products/ innovation	Launch at least 25 new products into the industrial channel in 2010 and 2011.
         Meeting the needs of customers	Achieve at least 95% excellent customer service rating each month, increase the proportion of sales bookings from repeat business to 45% for the summer season.
         Entering a new market/ market positioning	Supply a minimum of 50,000 trial downloads per month, increase the number of customer enquiries from the EU by 10,000 per month.
         Gaining an advantage over competitors	Reduce average distribution costs to less than 5% of gross revenue. Reduce the order lead time by 15%. Improve brand recognition amongst the 25-34 age group.

         Objective area	Example objectives
         Maintaining or increasing market share	Achieve revenue growth of 15% per year for the next four years increase our market share by 4% by 2015, improve the online order conversion rate from 65% to 75% by 2011.
         Developing new products/ innovation	Launch at least 25 new products into the industrial channel in 2010 and 2011.
         Meeting the needs of customers	Achieve at least 95% excellent customer service rating each month, increase the proportion of sales bookings from repeat business to 45% for the summer season.
         Entering a new market/ market positioning	Supply a minimum of 50,000 trial downloads per month, increase the number of customer enquiries from the EU by 10,000 per month.
         Gaining an advantage over competitors	Reduce average distribution costs to less than 5% of gross revenue. Reduce the order lead time by 15%. Improve brand recognition amongst the 25-34 age group.

         Table 1. Various Marketing objective

5. Advantage of our system over current system

   As discussed beforehand the issues with current scenario is that, the whole marketing strategy or blueprint formulation is done manually without much

   use of automate. Whereas our idea has quite a lot of advantages over traditional way which includes.

   • Quick blueprint formulation

   • Less Research cost

   • Instant result

   • Based on past Marketing Data

   • Up to date marketing data

   • Use of API[5]

   • Categorized Results

   • Options to select various Objectives.

   • Includes Online Marketing option.

6. ALGORITHM

   In this section we note down the steps the system will follow to provide end user the desired output. Steps are:

   Step 1: Visit the website application.

   Step 2: Enter the name or the name of the company.

   Step 3: Select the category of industry.

   Step 4: Select the budget range.

   Step 5: Select the objectives.

   Step 6: Select the target audience.

   Step 7: Select the marketing type i.e online/offline or both.

   Step 8: If information is entered correctly then go to Step 10 else if you want to go back to homepage go to step 9.

   Step 9: Press RESET (takes the control back to homepage)

   Step 10: Press SUBMIT. A PDF is generated containing marketing blueprint.

7. Demo Search

   Consider a case wherein a end user, assuming it to be a manger who is looking get blueprint from our service. He has following requirements

   His budget is $10,000, he aims to increase the social reach of his Mobile Company in audience between the range of 15-35 and he plans to invest this only in online marketing

   Based on the above requirements, our system will run its algorithm for that specific industry

   Output for Demo search:

   The system will auto generate a Printable Document Format[PDF] which will have following details

   Name	XYZ Company
   Domain/Category	Mobile Industry
   Approximate Budget	$10,000/-
   Marketing Objective	Social Presence
   Target Audience	User in the range of 15-35 Years
   Type of Marketing	Online
   Websites for Online Marketing
   Facebook	20% spend on Facebook will help you reach 1 Million users
   Facebook Likes	10% spend on Facebook likes for pages will get you 20,000 Likes
   Youtube Marketing	40% spend will generate you 30,000 Page views
   Twitter Trend	15% spend on twitter will get your company trending for 2 hours on Twitter
   Google Adwords	25% Spend on Google Adwords will get you approximately 50,000 People talking about you.
   Total Reach	3 Million People talking about your Brand.

   Name	XYZ Company
   Domain/Category	Mobile Industry
   Approximate Budget	$10,000/-
   Marketing Objective	Social Presence
   Target Audience	User in the range of 15-35 Years
   Type of Marketing	Online
   Websites for Online Marketing
   Facebook	20% spend on Facebook will help you reach 1 Million users
   Facebook Likes	10% spend on Facebook likes for pages will get you 20,000 Likes
   Youtube Marketing	40% spend will generate you 30,000 Page views
   Twitter Trend	15% spend on twitter will get your company trending for 2 hours on Twitter
   Google Adwords	25% Spend on Google Adwords will get you approximately 50,000 People talking about you.
   Total Reach	3 Million People talking about your Brand.

   Table 2. Sample Output for a Demo Search

8. Conclusion

   In this paper we presented our proposed idea about automate, 1-click marketing blueprint formulation system which will provide a ready to implement blueprint document based on past marketing data, current trends and latest demands. The system will not only be based on past data but will also be categorized depending on the type of industry, budget, marketing objective, marketing type and also listed down current system of formulating marketing strategy and issues with current way of formulating blueprint for marketing. We also listed down various steps and stages involved in the system which cleared out the effectiveness of the system and depicted the simplicity of the system to which even a non managerial user can also use and look for various choices he has apart from traditional marketing.

   The future prospect of this proposed idea is simple, over the next 2 quarter we will implement this idea and make it a reality and cut out the issues that still exist in the current system, we will still continue to enhance our marketing database and look to improve and decide on the technologies that we will be using for implementation of this idea.

9. References

1. Marketing Definition, http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/marketing

2. Katherine Hubbard and Joyce Campbell, Automated Proposal preparation technique using a Marketing Text database, IEEE TRANSACTIONS OF PROFESSIONAL COMMUNICATION, June 1998, pp. 67-70.

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