BBA.LLB(Hons.

)/ Semester Four

Marketing IV

Internet Marketing and the uses it can possess to the e-commerce

Submitted to:

Prof. Shwetha Soman

School of Law, NMIMS

(Deemed to be University)

Submitted by:

Ankit Sathya

E020

SAP ID- 81022100164

Sr.No Particulars Pg. no

1 Abstract 3
 2 Introduction 3

3 Review of Literature 4

4 Research Objectives 6

5 Research Methodology 6

7 Hypothesis

8 Findings 6

9 Conclusion & Suggestion 11

10 References 13

Abstract -

This study has analysed a couple of key concepts which are growing vastly in importance and
their growth in use and demand will only keep expanding for decades to come , obviously these
are internet and social media marketing as well as tackling concepts in the E-Commerce industry
while analysing how small and mid size businesses can utilise these marketing strategies to
further grow their business, This paper analysed the various methods used by these businesses to
increase profits and maintain costs low. This paper talks about the different kinds of internet
marketing while also analysing one type of internet marketing being social media marketing in
vast detail while analysing the pros and cons of the dropshipping and social media marketing
businesses and marketing models. This paper provides suggestions for small scale and mid size
business owners on how to best utilise social media to grow their businesses while also providing
suggestions for how to establish social media marketing campaigns for your existing business.
This paper also analysed traditional marketing and purports why Internet Marketing has in the
authors opinion become far superior to traditional marketing.

Introduction -

Reaching your target audience at the appropriate time and place is the key to successful
marketing. Internet marketing is one of the simplest and most cost-effective ways to reach your
prospects because there are already more than 4.8 billion internet users worldwide. That seems to
be the era in which the internet and social media is taking over our life. Therefore, internet
marketing is an obvious technique businesses and in particular e-commerce businesses need to
utilise for boosting revenue and sales , but first we need to understand the crux of this topic.

What is internet marketing exactly?

Internet marketing is the process of promoting a business and its goods or services online using
methods that increase leads, traffic, and sales.

Internet marketing, often known as online marketing or digital marketing, uses digital platforms
to display multiple forms of advertising messages.

The word "internet marketing" serves as a catch-all for a variety of marketing techniques and
methods.

There is one aspect that all of these strategies have in common: they all centre on delivering
content. This theme applies to emails, search engines, social media posts, and blog articles.The
era of constant and nagging sales pitches and conventional marketing is over thanks to content
marketing.

Businesses can now deliver pertinent information to their audience with pin-point accuracy.

That's exactly what today's consumers want, so this is ideal.

Individuals do not want to be informed about goods and services that they are not interested in.

Today's consumers are pickier about the content they're willing to absorb, installing ad blockers
and using "Skip Ads" buttons.

Content marketing provides useful information that people may access on demand and that
answers their problems.

Review of Literature -

Constantine Katsikeas, Leonidas Leonidou, Athina Zeriti(2019) in their paper titled “ Revisiting
international marketing strategy in a digital era: Opportunities, challenges, and research directions
“ The authors emphasise the relevance and possibly significant influence that the use of
organisational resources and skills available online via the internet for reaching may have on
decisions regarding entering foreign markets as well as the selection, execution, and management
of international marketing strategies. The writers provide an explanation of how using digital
technology may help a company choose foreign markets and adopt successful marketing
strategies. They also provide insight into how using digital tools can help a company more
successfully implement and manage its global marketing strategy. This paper describes how
internet marketing could be beneficial for a business.
Fangfang Li, Jorma Larimo & Leonidas C. Leonidou(2020) in their paper titled “ Social media
marketing strategy: definition, conceptualization, taxonomy, validation, and future agenda “
talked about strategies on how to utilise social media to grow a businesses and how to best
utilise social media to grow your online presence , reach a larger customer base and interact
with your existing customers and try to help in CRM and maintaining existing customers at a far
easier rate. This paper talks about how it is more important to maintain consistency with
uploading content and they must also maintain the image they want the consumers to have of
the brand in their social media uploads and advertising done on social media.

Andrew N. Mason, John Narcum & Kevin Mason ( 2021) in their paper titled “ Social media
marketing gains importance after Covid-19 “ This article analysed and focused on the growth
and importance of social media marketing in the United States of America after the emergence of
covid and this paper discusses why social media marketing is beneficial to the company and how
it can provide an alternate stream of marketing for companies for bigger companies and small
companies and small scale industries could utilise this to benefit companies in the E-Commerce
space to grow faster and how there a vast large scale benefits. This paper used primary and
secondary data and using primary data to analyse through responses received in a questionnaire
to ascertain benefits of social media marketing by checking consumers perception on the
importance of the topic by analysing how often consumers use social media to purchase products
and a vast majority said they did use it especially to purchase electronic items.

Purba, A. A., Hamzah, M. L., & Rizki, M. (2022) in their paper titled “ Decision Making for
Optimal Marketing Strategy: A Case Study in E-Commerce “ this paper analysed the various
marketing strategies used in E-Commerce marketing and this paper used strategies to by
providing models and therefore analysing the best possible models for E-Commerce transactions
and business advertising.
This paper hypothesised how google Ads could be the best possible method to market for smaller
E-Commerce stores with smaller risk tolerances and less expansive marketing budgets available
at their disposal.

R Kumar (2022) in their study titled “ FACTORS THAT DRIVE E-COMMERCE GROWTH IN
INDIA “ analysed how E-commerce is booming in today's economic world. This paper defined
E-Commerce and how it is in essence a real store similar to physical stores with the only
difference being it is over the Internet , This paper discussed how E-Commerce is booming and
also showed how the next few years can grow at an even quicker rate , This paper explained the
main strategies needed for E-Commerce to be successful and for a business to make profitable
stores and make a small business owner profits.

Research Objectives -
 1) To analyse the human rights violations which might occur with a change in existing laws .
2) To examine the possible real life judicial precedents and examine their impact.
3) To evaluate whether the right to self incrimination is a need under the indian judicial
system.

Research Methodology -
The research methodology used in this paper was doctrinal research and secondary data was
utilised. No Primary data was utilised in this paper. For writing this paper the author utilised
second hand research by reviewing the following -
1) Publications related to the topic
2) Research papers on similar topics to this study.
3) Journal articles and websites on topics closely related to the topic.
4) Understanding the historical trends of the topic.

Hypothesis -

H0 - Internet and social media marketing is not the new norm when it comes to E-Commerce
business
H1 - Internet and Social media marketing is the most important form of marketing when it comes
to E-Commerce businesses beating out traditional marketing.

Findings -

Firstly to better understand the uses of internet marketing we need to understand how and why it
differs from traditional marketing and how it can be utilised by any business -

Today, we even dislike it when friends unexpectedly knock on our doors. Let alone door to door
salesmen or people involved with door to door promotions of any products or services.

The truth is that traditional marketing (or selling) is ineffective today.

It basically pushes products and information on individuals to coerce them into making a
purchase and most customers are vastly against this kind of marketing techniques.

You can attest to its validity because you have personally been spammed with phone calls,
television advertising, billboards, radio commercials, and commercials on other media promoting
goods that have absolutely no interest in you.

While conventional advertising may still be effective in some circumstances, online shopping has
revolutionised the requirements of marketing.
With an endless supply of knowledge at their disposal, users may now approach issue solving and
purchase decisions in a more radical manner.
People can look for items that suit their demands and stay away from those that don't rather easily
with internet marketing and as Ads are annoying if constantly spammed at us , we can all agree on
that this can aid many consumers. Traditional marketing can divert our attention and stop us in
our tracks while we search for truly beneficial material. Also, advertisements in traditional format
are no longer the preferred method for individuals to discover new things.

Brands and marketers need to adopt a different strategy. Instead of interfering with consumers'
lives they should ask questions first and offer answers second, rather than the other way around
content marketing may help with that.

In order to generate content that motivates, informs, or solves a problem for their potential
customers, brands might explore the particular requirements of their target audience..
People can discover such internet stuff on their own terms through a series of searches as opposed
to having it thrust upon them. If the material is valuable, people will keep coming back for more.
With content marketing, the consumer is in control. Individuals make a choice on whether to
interact with the brand and spread the word within their social network. This makes it possible for
companies to build strong, meaningful connections with their audience that are built on authority
and trust. Such devoted followers may convert to leads when they're ready, at their own pace,
when you prioritise the requirements of the customer before your own, this is what occurs in a
vast majority of cases.

With this paper we primarily tackle how to utilise Internet marketing for E-commerce businesses
and these primarily use Social Media platforms to put out content and directly roll out Ads
through the platform. Social media marketing is a form of social media marketing that uses social
platforms with people posting content to boost sales by adding an ad either in the content or
before the content. We need to dive deeper into understanding social media marketing to
understand the benefit it holds to E-commerce platforms and dropshipping.
Social media marketing, often referred to as digital marketing and e-marketing, is the process of
using social media—the websites where people create social networks and exchange information
to strengthen a company's reputation, boost sales, and direct visitors to its website. Social media
marketing gives businesses a method to interact with current consumers and attract new ones. It
also contains data analytics features that are specifically designed to help marketers monitor the
effectiveness of their campaigns and find new ways to interact.

Benefits of Social Media Marketing -

1) Humanise your company: With social media, you may make your company a market
player who is engaged with customers. Your audience may get familiar and comfortable
 with you through your profile, postings, and interactions with other users. This helps them
to connect with you and develop a sense of confidence in you.
2) Boost traffic: Using the links in your profile, the links in your posts, and your
advertisements, social media is a top avenue for boosting traffic to your website, where
you may turn users into customers. Other SEO factors include social signals.
3) Produce leads and conversions: These platforms also allow you to produce leads and
conversions directly with tools like Instagram and Facebook stores, direct messaging, call-
to-action buttons on profile pages, and the ability to schedule appointments.
4) Boost brand awareness: Social media platforms' visual nature enables you to develop your
visual identity and spread it among a sizable audience. Furthermore, increased brand
recognition will improve the outcomes of all your other initiatives.
5) Establish connections: By using these platforms, you may connect with people directly
and establish direct and indirect lines of contact with your followers. You can also use
these channels to network, receive feedback, host conversations, and arrange events.

The components of an effective social media marketing plan -

Every company's effective social media marketing plan will appear different, but they will all
share the following characteristics:

Understanding your audience - includes knowing what platforms they use, when and why they
use them, what material they enjoy, who else they follow, and more.
What message are you trying to get through to your audience? When they watch your material,
how do you want them to feel? While there is some sense of randomness on social media, you'll
need a systematic content strategy to be able to establish a recognisable voice and consistently
generate high-quality material.

Analytics: Quantifiable insights can guide your approach by helping you identify your target
audience, the best material to publish, when to post, and other important factors.

Frequent activity: Social media is a real-time medium. You must publish frequently, monitor
engagements with your company, respond to interactions, follow trends, and keep up with profiles
that are accurate if you want to use it to expand your business.

Inbound strategy: Avoid advertising on social media. Concentrate on improving those around you
and offering value through relevant and engaging material. Your company will then naturally be
promoted as a result of this by others.

Developing a social media marketing strategy -

When a business decides to Implement a social media marketing plan apart from just being aware
of its fundamental components. A good social media marketing strategy is to be implemented
according to a road map. It gives structure to your work so you can assess the progress of your
businesses and determine how effectively you're using your resources.

Some key steps might be to -

Selecting a platform based on your target market-

Establish objectives and goals: They should be straightforward and task-like to begin with, such
as making one post every day for a month, setting up your profiles, or performing a competitive
analysis. You'll be able to establish more precise and strategic objectives, such as growing your
following by a certain pre - determined growth rate.

Regularly report and adjust: Use the metrics provided by each site to determine which posts
receive the most interaction, whether you are gaining new followers, and the demographics of
your audience. Use what is effective and expand it, and eliminate what is not.

What is Dropshipping -

Dropshipping is a retail fulfilment strategy where a shop doesn't maintain inventory of the goods
it offers. Instead, it makes a purchase from a third party and arranges for the item to be delivered
to the consumer. As a result, the seller is relieved of direct product management.

Dropshipping and the traditional retail model vary most in that the selling merchant does not hold
or own goods. Instead, to fill orders, the seller buys inventory as needed from a third party—
typically a wholesaler or manufacturer.

In Dropshipping , A businesses owner contacts suppliers in countries like India , Bangladesh and
China to purchase bulk orders at cheap prices after receiving a marked up price for it by using
adequate marketing for the product essentially creating no or limited downside for the business.
This most commonly is done by using websites like Ali-baba and Ali-Express which are chinese
manufacturer to consumer product sales websites.

Some advantages of dropshipping can be -

Cheaper Costs - Costs associated with keeping a storage facility or transporting goods to clients
may be reduced by dropshipping because you don't store or ship the products.

Beginning costs: Dropshipping may be used by business owners who want to launch a Business
venture with a little financial commitment because they don't need to purchase equipment or other
resources to fulfil orders.
Less risk: Since you don't have to pay for inventory, there is less chance that you will lose money
as a result of missing goods or placing excessive orders.

Multi-channel selling: You may employ dropshipping for your company while marketing through
social media, your own website, an online retailer like Amazon, or all of the above.

Operational location: With dropshipping, you may complete orders from anywhere, giving you
the flexibility to operate from home.
Scalability: By utilising suppliers, it may be possible to take more orders while keeping the same
amount of goods in stock for packing, shipping, and storage.

Large range of products: Based on your agreement, you might not need to pre-purchase inventory,
allowing you to sell a bigger selection of goods and perhaps earn more money.

Flexibility: Dropshipping enables you to try many products to see which ones sell the best without
having to worry about losing your initial investment.

Some disadvantages to dropshipping include -

Competition is fierce - Dropshipping is a very competitive industry because of the cheap startup
costs and required capital.

Product quality: Since dropshipping decreases your involvement in the order fulfilment process,
you have less control over the quality of the products you sell and are unable to guarantee their
quality.

Branding: You can find it difficult to set your product apart from identical goods made by other
vendors since the things you sell might not be particularly distinctive or easy to differentiate from
them.

Profit margins: If your product has little to no points of differentiation, your company may find
itself engaging in more intense pricing competition. Low price points might reduce your profit
margin.

Timeline for fulfilment: When a dropshipping provider handles fulfilment, you have no influence
over order selection, packing, or delivery.

Inventory management: It might not be feasible to provide real-time information on what is

Errors made by the supplier: Budget Strung dropshippers may make blunders when completing
client orders. This could result in incomplete orders, poor packaging, and missing products.

Complicated customer service: If you use dropshipping, you're still in charge of maintaining your
reputation and satisfying your consumers. If something goes wrong throughout the fulfilment
process, you can be responsible for handling customer support.

Now ideally how can we market a dropshipping businesses -

We have 2 major ways utilised to market drop shipping businesses , A lower risk or sometimes
even no risk method or a medium risk method and due to the low risk nature of the businesses
even the highest risk method is fairly risk averse.

First method or the low risk technique of marketing a dropshipping business -

Utilising Influencers on Instagram , facebook and other social media platforms -

This in itself can be done in two ways , the no risk and low risk approach. Many instagram
accounts with large counts including celebrities like Cristiano Ronaldo and Virat Kohli sell
sponsored content now obviously content posted by them will be extremely high risk due the
amounts involved but many instagram accounts who have average post interaction ranging from
50-100 thousand views per post only charge about 125$(10,000 rupees) for a 24 hour post on their
page and this is therefore rather low risk , an average dropshipping store can land about 4-5%
conversion rate as anyone who clicks on the website has seen a video of the product being utilised
and is therefore interested in purchase. 125 dollars (10,000 rupees) can land us a 100k views
which might land us only about 250 website viewers assuming the ad performs slightly under par
and even just 250 views with a meagre 2% conversion rate can land us 5 sales and if the product
is expensive enough we can easily turn a small profit and if enough advertisements are played on
different pages of similar stature we can generate a profitability in the lakhs of rupees monthly. If
you would like a less profitable but no risk version to this we could even create an agreement with
the page owner or influencer to split profits from the sales and not pay any upfront fee for the
advertisement creating a win - win scenario with no downside for either party.

The slightly riskier but far more profitable business model -

involves primarily marketing through instagram and facebook as running ads through these
platforms provides us with vast amounts of data available and using the data available to
consumers to better market the data to your target audience to create a conversion rate of greater
than 4% and a click on the ad rate of greater than 2.5%. These ads might be slightly more
expensive and have a variable price range but can also be far more profitable if the right team is
employed to market these products and businesses. The vast amount of statistics this form of
advertising provides any business and business owner can also be utilised in us determining what
products sell and what products are not profitable while also helping us understand what kind of
advertisements work and what advertisements are far less effective and under performing..

Conclusion and suggestions -

Social Media and internet marketing is the dawn of this era and is the future of not only marketing
but life in general as we move towards digitalisation of even smaller areas in India , Internet
marketing is not only going to benefit benefits by targeting this new consumer base but also allow
smaller less capital intensive business to target the international market. In this study we also
learnt about dropshipping and Social Media Marketing which go hand in hand as the two can be
interlinked as dropshipping largely only works based on Social Media and Internet based
Marketing systems. Dropshipping is a little to no cost business which runs by purchasing
inventory from manufacturers in China and other cheap production houses like India and
Bangladesh but is mainly done through ali express and ali baba , two huge E-commerce platforms
founded by Jack Ma. This essentially means the business has no inventory and all orders are
placed only after received and the markup charged is the profit. In this Business model the reason
the consumer pay extra is due to a lack of knowledge about being able to purchase a product
direct from the manufacturer and for the branding and marketing activities done by these
companies, The main way is by utilising social Media Marketing to release creative and catchy
Ads and in order to do this a few key steps must be followed for a business to remain profitable
using the dropshipping method , firstly they need to create an Ad which not only showcases the
features and a catchy point about the product and also points out the cost and why the product will
benefit its target market. Dropshipping Ads need to be run on either an influencers page or on the
direct sponsored posts and story ads offered by instagram and facebook. Both these methods can
be profitable but however even though the risk associated with marketing without influencers and
directly with the platform due to increased costs is higher it helps scale the business to new
heights at a much faster pace as advertisements can run out automatically by just increasing the
budget and also the data provided about how ads and the store is performing can help further
better and boost the ad and make for a match smoother marketing process for the business aiding
their profitability and scalability to help generate a far greater return than influencers can ever
provide , however the influencer approach could be utilised by beginners with a low budget who
cannot take large risks by investing into fixed ad rates or by hiring a team of marketers
specialising in social media marketing to generate revenue and sales for their product or service.
We can definitively say that H1 is accurate as businesses need to prioritise internet and social
media marketing over traditional marketing in E-commerce. To an extent traditional marketing
still benefits large E-commerce brands like amazon and flipkart but to them and even more so to
all the start ups and yet to be mainstream brands Digital , Influencer and Internet marketing serves
as a cost effective and highly successful option of advertising and marketing their business.

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