Overview
Alavana provides business intelligence about competitors' web marketing strategies in markets such as banking, insurance, mobile phones, retailing and fashion. Web marketing is having a profound effect on the way that companies interact with their customers by enabling new forms of communication and marketing. The strategic potential is to improve every stage of the market adoption process: awareness of brands; customer attitudes; lead generation; validation of leads; propensity to buy; evaluation of competing products; the purchasing process; the delivery of the product or service; and customer retention. McKinsey (2007, "How companies are marketing online: A McKinsey Global Survey", www.mckinsey.com.), in a survey of leading marketing executives worldwide predicts that by 2010, the majority of consumers will use the web to inform their choice of purchase, a third will carry out a proportion of their purchasing online, and web sales will account for 10% of total retail sales, a 100% increase on web sales in 2007.
As banks, insurance companies and retailers increase their investments into web marketing relative to conventional media and other promotional activities, it becomes crucial to evaluate the effectiveness of these investments. So far evaluation in most companies has focussed on web design, growth in number of hits and identification of the point at which users leave. These are all important measures of performance, but they are inadequate insofar as they tell us nothing about performance relative to competitors. Alavana has developed a framework that enables a company to evaluate the performance of its web marketing strategy in key areas such as web size relative to its largest competitor, web visibility, the impact of web 2.0 and price comparison sites and customer behaviour. Rather than take a static view of markets, Alavana offers this service on an ongoing basis with updated analysis and reports of performance data over time, which enables a dynamic analysis of the development and evolution of a particular market such as online insurance, banking or telecommunications.
Web Statistics and Marketing
Recent statistics on international internet access show that in the EU over 50% of households have access to the internet and retail e-commerce is now at 4.1% of retail sales. Within Europe there is a large variance with the leading countries having significantly higher rates of access than the laggards, e.g. Netherlands (80%), Denmark (79%), Sweden (77%) and UK (63%). As a single country the US has the highest overall number of internet users with over 200 million users online accounting for 70% of its population. Figures for internet penetration in other countries and regions include Japan (68%), China (12%), India (5.3%) Middle East (17%), Australia (72%), South America (21%) and Africa (4.7%) (Nielsen/ NetRating 2006). Between 2000 and 2007 the growth rates for developing countries indicate that they will soon catch up with the leaders. Compare, for example, the growth rates of India (1000%), China (620%), South America (445%) with the US (120%), Europe (206%) and the UK (114%). In the UK, usage patterns of the internet show that over 40% of online users access banking and financial services websites (National Statistics Office 2007).