Online Interactivity the Secret Sauce to Internet Marketing

Interactive Marketing is what differentiates the old marketing style from the new marketing wave. The biggest difference with both styles is that with the old style sellers would try to persuade their audiences by pushing down as much media as possible to everyone, not just their target audience to create traffic to their websites or stores. We all know the examples, T.V commercial, radio commercials, flyers, mail, emails, online Ads, etc... People would receive hundreds of offers from companies asking them to buy their services or products and then trying to create a trust or bond with the customers. It used to work to some extend, but we all now know that there was no relationship involved between the buyers and the sellers.

Online interactivity is about creating a conversation from human to human, instead of from corporation to individual, in a sense is a closer and more real transaction and it fosters trust between buyers and sellers. This is where companies can create a conversation with their target audience, develop a bond or trust and then have raving fans willing and eager to buy the services or products from the sellers. Online interactivity is not just about having a conversation, but about showing results in advance for the customers. As a result, people want to do business with the brand because they show that they care about helping solve the problems for their clients.

Now let's take a look at the problems associated with online interactivity and possible solutions:

1. Interacting with consumers takes a lot of time, and time means money. It is true that this something that it take money and it could be expensive, but there are different ways that online interactivity could be achieve without expending a lot of money. For example, tools like auto responders, how to videos, find an answer section or learning university as some companies like Ebay have. All of these systems could be automated and reduce the labor cost in the long run for companies.
2. Interaction is not always positive. This is something that it is a reality in any business you will always find unhappy customers and as brand you will be responsible for making sure that your online positive presence could be larger than the negative.
3. As more companies interact, your brand isn't so special anymore. It is true, but as a competitor you should be able to create joint ventures programs with your own competition and split your lunch instead having nothing at all. Most importantly, differentiate your brand from your competition and you will have more chance as well.
4. Once you start a consumer "friendship," it's hard to stop. If you want to create a relationship with your customers, you have to make sure that they have a spokes person that they can associate with the will reduce the risk of having them associate with the employee instead.
5. Consumer interactions with each other may damage your brand image. This is definitely has to be monitor and control. But the only true way avoid this is to create results in advance for people and a strong trust based relationship that could help diminish the negative effects of having your competition use it against you.

At the end the only possible solution to this is making sure that you can deliver far more value than what your customer expect from the exchange of their time and money.