About business models

The first thing to understand is that nothing is for free on the internet as hosting and processing data cost money (web hosting, domain names, people working on the infrastructure). That's why you often here that "when it is free, it means that you are the product").

Having a website means that you need a domain name (so to pay a registrar for at least a year as keeping an IP address is not conventional and will not help your website to rank within search engines) and a web hosting platform (so to say a computer hosting your data, which is probably not going to be one within your house), as it costs money, organizations need to define a way to get money out of the service they are providing in order to get back their return on investment, this is what we call a business model, let's see some examples of business models:
  • https://www.wikipedia.org is living thanks to the donations coming from anyone.
  • https://www.qwant.com is making revenues from ads coming from Microsoft and displayed when someone is performing a search.
  • https://impots.gouv.fr, the French tax system is living from public funds, coming from the tax that people are paying.
  • https://www.lefigaro.fr, is making a living from the paid subscription offers it has.
  • https://www.trucsdegrandmere.com, works thanks to ads which are displayed on the website.
  • https://www.amazon.fr is making money based on the commissions of each transaction.
  • ...

Note that it would be a similar configuration if we were talking about software development (you need to pay the developers working on the project and the marketing/communication associated to it) so as for mobile app (indexing on the stores, paying developers and so on).

As we just saw building up a website, a software, a mobile app has a cost, in order to get your return on investment, you need to define a business model. In order for this business model to work, you need clients, and in order to reach your clients you need to define a marketing strategy.

Which difference between a marketing strategy and an e-marketing strategy?

In fact, not much, the "e-" is simply here in order to say that one is going define its strategy only within digital channels, the one which are not physical, even if we are seeing more and more hybrid technologies linking physical and digital, that's why talking about a marketing strategy in general makes more sense.

The concept behind an e-marketing strategy stay the same as a marketing one. Here is a non exhaustive list of channels you may have to use to reach your audience:

  • Word to mouth.
  • Search Engine Optimisation.
  • Sponsored listing.
  • Social networks.
  • Affiliate marketing.
  • Emailing/Newsletters.
  • Video marketing.
  • Marketplaces/Price comparison websites.
  • ...

Last modified: Thursday, 6 August 2020, 11:53 AM