are businesses succeeding in sri lanka through online marketing?
TRANSCRIPT
ARE BUSINESSES SUCCEEDDING IN SRI LANKA
THROUGH ONLINE MARKETING?
Authors:
Arjun Rajeswaran
Virtusa (Pvt) Ltd
Nishanthi Raveendran
University of Peradeniya
Introduction Online marketing is a form of marketing and advertising to
deliver messages to customers in attractive and effective way and
keeps communication via internet. It includes email marketing,
Search Engine Marketing(SEM), social media marketing, many
types of display advertising , and mobile marketing.
It is the new trend of marketing in all over the world in last
couple of decades and leads to a new world that is so small that we
can buy anything with touch of our fingertip.
Due to the improvements in the web designing and other
technologies with regard to the internet, the internet advertising
methods and online marketing are getting improved day by day.
Factors behind online marketing1. New trends and developments for online marketing
• Mobile friendly web sites
• New business strategies
• Pay per click advertisements
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• E- mail marketing
• Google facilities
• Social media
• Rotating testimonials, forums and blogs
Contd…..
2. Internet Penetration in Sri Lanka
• The number of internet users in Sri Lanka is growing rapidly and at
present Sri Lanka boasts of a total population of 21 million. From these,
over four million of Sri Lankans have online access.
• Since there is a vast expansion of internet facilities, Sri Lankan internet
users spend much amount of time to surfing the net for various
purposes continues to increase.
• According to the latest published report by internetlivestats.com, Sri
Lanka is ranked 74th among 198 counties, in terms of internet users. It
is having 4,267,507 internet users with 19.9% penetration. And it is
expected that it will reach the mass of 50% penetration in few years .
Methodology
According to the web sites ranking of Alexa.com top 500 web
sites are taken and within them top 41 web sites which are
providing online marketing services in Sri Lanka are selected.
It is divided into 6 major categories such as online shopping,
shopping classifieds, finance and banking, internet and
telecom, government and career education.
Mainly considered the traffic that directed to each online
marketing site. To get traffic detail, we used similarweb.com.
Find out top 500 websites of Sri Lanka
Find out 41 Sri Lankan sites which are providing the online marketing
Divided into six major category
online shopping
finance and
banking
shopping and
classifieds
internet and
telecomgovernment career
education
Find out the traffic of each sites
Contribution of social media
Find out the traffic
source
Getting traffic details through Similarweb.com
• We used similarweb.com to collect traffic details which is
directed to each web sites by using similar web chrome
addon.
• We could get six month traffic data (From September
2014 to February 2015 ).
• It could able to analyze each category and sources, from
which, the traffic is directed to each site and details
about social media on online marketing.
Average traffic
CategoriesAverage monthly traffic
for each website
Shopping Classifieds 55,207.81
Online Shopping 11,512.32
Internet and Telecom 38,834.65
Finance and Banking 50,179.47
Government 15,030.43
Career and Education 67,402.67
Traffic from each category (monthly)
Internet-
Telec
om
Finan
ce an
d bankin
g
online S
hopping
shopping -
Classifi
elds
caree
r - ed
ucation
Govern
ment
0
1000000
2000000
3000000
4000000
5000000
6000000
totalAvgl
The traffic of shopping classifieds is remarkable. And online shopping also shows the higher degree of traffic. At the same time, government service shows the lower value of traffic.
Most popular websites in Sri Lanka in each category
Shopping classifieds – ikman.lk
Online shopping – wow.lk
Internet and telecom – dialog.lk
Government – dlb.lk
Finance and banking – combank.net
Career and education – topjobs.lk
Traffic SourcesThere are mainly six sources are influenced on traffic to each web site.
Direct traffic
Referrals
Search traffic
Social traffic
Display
Out of all sources, search traffic and direct traffic are main
contributors to whole traffic of each web site.
Some facts on social media
Social media channels are fast growing in Sri Lanka with a
substantial growth in internet connectivity .
Face book is outperforming than any other media and it is
more popular in Sri Lanka than advertising on Google Ad
words.
Face book with approximate 2,900,000 users which is
about 13.52% of Sri Lanka’s total population and 67.96% in
relation to number of internet users. In other words more
than half the internet users have face book accounts.
Cont….. Compare to retail market in Sri Lanka, internet market has a smaller share. Reaching the online population which is approximately 20% at this moment is not enough for a business. Sri Lankans still show some degree of hesitation when it comes to making a purchase online for the following reason.
A lot of people still do not believe thing that are not tangible. Postal service and courier service are sometimes unreliable delivery. Companies may not be able to guarantee prompt delivery.
The traditional consultants and advertising agencies in Sri Lanka are too don’t know much about these latest trends in online marketing.
Limitations and suggestion for future studies….
This study was examined only 41 online marketing sites due to
the time and availability since there are not much online
marketing in Sri Lanka. It is suggested to increase the number of
web sites as to get more accurate results.
Considering past 3 or 4 years data will give more accurate
results.
Consideration of online sale per year will also give more details
about the trend of online marketing.