Discuss the emerging trends in e-marketing in Ghana

Introduction
The World Wide Web (also referred Internet, or simply as the Web) has been turning into
indispensible global communication media over the last two decades. Nowadays, billions of
people around the world are online for 24 hours a day. On one hand, the Internet users are
constantly growing particularly in developing markets like China, the Americas, Africa and
Europe. On other hand, the broadband Interment connections are getting wide-spread in the
developed countries in North America, Europe, and South-East Asia. These two major
developments of the last several years make possible many new trends in Internet marketing
strategies to occur. New trends in internet marketing are successfully employed by global
companies like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Jumia and many others. In addition, internet offers
some valuable options for reducing the cost of many marketing strategies, which is becoming
more important in the presence of world-wide financial and economic crisis.

The application of Internet as a novel business tool created completely new approaches for doing
business known as Internet or Online marketing. The usage of Internet for providing services or
products is known as Internet, Online, Web, or simply e-marketing. Since, the internet has
become a global interactive media the impact of the Internet marketing has dramatically
increased over the last decade. Internet marketing is all about generating web traffic to a
particular website and employing this traffic for generating sells of products and/or services, and
making promotions of any kind including online advertising campaigns.

Internet has profoundly changed the way we do business in many different areas and has created
completely new business models. With its global reach Internet has turned electronic commerce
(e-commerce) into the fastest growing tool for promoting, selling, and buying services and goods
around the world, 24 hours a day.

The e-commerce is a traditional and important part of Internet marketing. In addition, Internet
marketing has currently expanded into many different business areas beyond e-commerce. For
instance, online banking has been provided by growing number of banks that offer very useful
services to their clients 24 hour a day not matter where they are. Selling products directly to
consumers via Internet is known as B2C (business to consumers) while selling goods to
businesses is known as B2B (business to businesses). Websites that are used to sell directly to
customers or businesses are known as lead-based sites. Another e-commerce approach is referred
as affiliate marketing. This is an arrangement between an online merchant and affiliate, in which
the affiliate earns a commission for generating sales, leads, traffic, and/or clicks for the
merchant’s website. For example, many credit card companies are paying a commission for each
visitor sent to their website who completes a credit card application.

Targeting actual, former, or potential consumers with email messages is known as email
marketing. The email messages can be sent for various marketing purposes including acquiring
new customers, adding advertisements to e-mail for new products, encouraging current or former
customer loyalty, or sending e-mails over the Internet to unknown recipients. There are many
advantages of email-marketing like low cost, fast delivery, and others. There are many computer
programs that can generate media reach emails and can send emails to many consumers
simultaneously. At the same time email marketing is facing a real problem caused by the huge
amount of unwonted (spam) email messages. Many companies in Ghana have well realized the
problems facing email marketing by the spam email and have tried to address it using newsletters
and other new forms of email marketing.

Social network marketing is making headlines these days as the most noticeable social websites
are Facebook, Twitter, and Myspace. There are currently more than 40 different social
networking sites on the web with over 350 million registered users only by Facebook. It is a very
fast growing new field of Internet marketing that may be very efficient in addressing specific
groups of consumers. Facebook marketing is a very productive approach for relationships
building marketing strategy and promoting new products and services among targeting groups of
consumers. Many companies like Dell, Sony, and many others are now using Internet marketing
by creating official company’s pages in Facebook and other social networking websites. The
social websites are accessible not only via personal computers but also though mobile devices
like iPhone. This represents a recent trend that bustles additionally the growing field of mobile
phone marketing. As a result many companies are making their leading websites mobile phones
friendly. Facebook has played a remarkable role in the presidential campaign of President
Akuffo Addo and that of John Mahama. The Facebook campaign demonstrated the enormous
power of social networking websites for organizing groups of specific interests.
Blogging marketing is also an important communication channel for many companies that wont
to be in touch with their customers. A growing number of customers want to voice their opinions
on products and services they have purchased. At the same time many companies are realizing
the huge potential of using Internet blogs for trustful by consumers online advertising.

New important trends in internet advertising apart from mobile phones are so called viral and
widgets marketing. Despite its dangerous name viral marketing is a new advertising method for
getting a marketing message spread among a targeting group of consumers by their own emails
usually employing funny animations, videos, or pictures. Widgets are small web applications
widely used on social networking websites that are designed to get the visitor’s attention. Video
marketing on Internet has been expanding in the last few years as the YouTube having the lead.
Many global corporations like Dell and Sony have set up their official websites in YouTube.
Moreover, they have built their in YouTube channels.

Internet marketing can be employed to different scopes including international, county-wide as

well as local businesses. The local Internet marking is used by home-based companies
traditionally selling goods in their local areas and using Internet to find and attract local
consumers. However, Internet marking is usually focusing on broadly targeting specific interests
rather than reaching out some local area. Wide-spread methods for target specific interests online
are search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimization (SEO). Both methods aim to
increase the popularity of a website within a target group of interests by attracting Internet traffic
via keyword search in Internet search engines.

The true power of Internet marketing lies in its global reach. In order to make the global Internet
marketing more efficient various geo targeting methods are being applied in recent years. In geo-
targeting different methods are used to locate geographically website visitors and to adapt the
website’s content to their language and culture. The geo-targeting methods in Internet marking
are made possible because the development of novel Internet programming tools that make the
Web content dynamic and adaptive to a concrete user.