Internet advertising comprises of banner advertisements, Google AdWords and any other forms of display advertising that are used to promote a product or business. Interactive marketing includes any medium or platform that encourages engagement with the end user about the product, services or business in an effort to solve their questions, concerns and address their complaints. Interactive marketing is primarily about brand building and relationship development, not sales. This is an important distinction to understand for marketers.

Those who try to sell on the interactive mediums find that their efforts are wasted – this, however, does not include activities related to f-commerce, which builds an e-commerce (electronic storefront) behind an existing social media presence on Facebook.

This is the first in a series of specialized presentations that address the metrics that comprise the digital metric category. New presentations will be posted every week to help you learn more about the digital platforms and how to quantify activities on each.

We hope you enjoy the discussion and please share your thoughts, comments and queries with us.

Part I

Part II

Today, we are proud to launch the new iMedia website and introduce the new brand identity to our clients and to you, our existing and potential clients, as part of a major creative shift in our team structure.

When Khalid Muhammad, emagine’s Group Managing Director, was asked about the new site and logo, he said -

iMedia has been a cornerstone to the growth of the emagine group, along with emagine consulting and tesla communications. While the team at iMedia does a great deal of work outside the emagine framework, we are especially pleased with the new dynamic that is being created between the emagine group and iMedia. They will no longer be a secondary part of the emagine family, but one of the shining stars that we push forward for everyone to take in and work with.

iMedia’s Principal Sabahat Muhammad’s comment on the new logo and dynamic -

For several years, iMedia has hovered between the definition of a full-fledged design house, and a freelancer working with other freelancers. The transient and constantly fluttering image of a butterfly, therefore, was both appropriate and, well, really pretty to look at. With a slight adjustment in philosophy, though, we feel the need to change the company’s window display. We are more streamlined, more minimalistic, more engaged in the gestalt of design, and working much closer with the emagine group. We think the new logo covers all of that.

While emagine will continue to provide marketing and brand strategic support to the iMedia team for it’s clients, today we are proud to release the butterfly that iMedia has been.

Additionally, you will notice in the presentation that there are some slides that I did not cover. The slides relate to market segmentation, which I am assuming that you have done in your marketing and consumer behavior courses.

In this lecture, we also introduce you to a process we use at emagine called Idea Proofing, which allows us to break business ideas down into relevant components to determine how viable they are and whether we want to be involved. Idea proofing is a simple concept to grasp but very difficult to implement and use because it requires objective understanding, industry knowledge and market research. All things that the entrepreneur should include in their business plan, but as an evaluator, you must also have the knowledge to know what is correct and what is colored with emotion.

The Business Plan Canvas is a 1 page document that maps all the necessary information that you need to write a winning business plan without the fluff of emotion and passion. In this lecture, we talk about the first 2 parts of the 9 pieces that make up the business plan – Customer Segmentation and the Value Proposition.

The first lecture – New Venture Creation – An Overview – gives you an understanding of the problems that entrepreneurs must struggle with in Pakistan, ranging from support networks and financing to getting the business idea right. I have left some information out of the slides, because we will be covering it in other lectures so there is no need for repetition.

This lecture also sets the understanding of the state of entrepreneurship in Pakistan and its reasons for not being as successful domestically. Successful entrepreneurship requires a number of factors ranging from government support, active financial opportunities and new client availability. Without these things, entrepreneurship will not succeed in an economy or nation.

Lastly, we move forward into understanding how to move beyond these barriers and build successful ventures setting the foundations for future lectures.

In the modern age of marketing, too many marketers build very general profiles for their target markets in the hope that they will get a higher return on their marketing message. Sadly, this is not the case and most messages end up being wasted on people that are either not able to afford the offering or not interested in it at all. When your marketing is untargeted, you may as well just light your marketing budget on fire because it has the same result.

In the next two presentations, we will help you to understand your customers and learn how to properly profile and segment them so that your marketing message and activities deliver results for the brand, both in the mind and at the bottomline. In the this presentation, we will discuss the different types of customers and their characteristics, along with building an understanding of how to segment our market for more effective results. In the second lecture, we will learn how to build a proper customer profile based on demographics, psychographics, habits, interests and behaviors. These are both a lead up to the Customer Lifetime Value discussion that will be the third presentation of the series.

As always, feel free to post any questions or comments below. We are here to help you understand this material better and implement it in your organizations.