Incorporate the Product Life Cycle with Internet Marketing

There can be some serious money made if you do internet marketing correctly online. However, what I have noticed more and more is that people are saying how to do internet marketing but are not explaining when to do internet marketing. So, yes, you might be a complete expert on how to advertise and promote something online. But, when to use such a skill might come at a struggle to understand. This is where business-thinkers shine.

Internet marketing should be done based on the product life cycle: this is a cycle which is known very well throughout the business industry to describe the stages which every product or service goes through. For this reason, here is the product life cycle and how you can use your internet marketing skills at different parts of the cycle.

• Research and product development – This is when you are preparing to come up with new ideas for what you are wanting to sell and is usually done in secret and ‘behind the scenes’.
• Introduction – The introduction is where the product/service is officially launched into the market – this is the point where internet marketing will be most effective. In order to get your product/service up and selling, you need to share your product/service with the world which can be done with internet marketing. This is also the area where the majority of your advertising budget will be used to make the public become aware of your new product/service. For this reason, you will want to make sure you get out of the introduction stage as quickly as possible and onto the growth stage.
• Growth – You will be able to go tell you are in the growth stage when you could stop your internet marketing and still be making a consistent amount of sales/profit without any advertising. However, this does not mean you should stop marketing full stop. During the growth stage, you should continually reduce your budget towards marketing as your profit and sales increase. Once you have reduced your marketing budget to zero, your product will be ever closer to the maturity stage.
• Maturity – The maturity stage occurs when you profit/sales starts to dip in a negative fashion or level out. Any business will tell you that they never want any of their product or services entering this stage because it means it is fading and dying out. Therefore, they will usually change something about the product/service, such as pricing or innovating to produce new features, in order to get the product/service back into the growth stage. Ultimately, for internet marketers, if you make any changes to the product/service, you should spend a little time marketing this online so people are aware of the change.
• Decline – This is the stage when the product/service goes downhill very quickly. In this situation, there are two possible things you can do…
• Rejuvenation or Termination – If you terminate the product/service, you are done. If you decide to rejuvenate, you can do this by re-marketing the product/service again to get as much profit out of the dying product/service before you eventually terminate it.

From this, the best places to perform internet marketing is during the introduction, growth and then maturity/rejuvenation.