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If you turn on your “Go Back in Time” machine, you’ll find that Cluster Marketing has been around for a long time. Little has changed over the centuries since the business world stumbled upon the concept. In its simplest definition, Cluster Marketing means: “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” In other words, “don’t spend your entire marketing budget on one medium or one geographic area.”

Conventional Marketing Strategies

Fifth Avenue in New York. Advertising powerhouses have led the way in America with their big dollar ad campaigns that only corporate giants can afford. Before designing an advertising campaign, they first design a marketing plan. They identify their target market by geography, age, gender, socioeconomic values, hobbies, house size, shoe size, shirt size, etc. Some trading strategies can use up to a hundred or more parameters to define your target market. Sounds excessive right? Not really when you consider that megadollars in potential sales are at stake. Many advertising companies and marketing executives have lost their jobs when a marketing strategy and advertising plan failed.

The conventional strategy has been the use of various advertising media such as television commercials, newspaper advertisements, direct mail advertising, radio commercials, etc. All of these methods require a lot of money up front to produce and distribute. Your approach has been to get the buyer to look in the direction of the product and to create a need in the potential customer to buy your product. Cluster marketing strategies are used to define what media will be used to advertise the product and where the product will be sold.

Let’s look at an example creating newspaper ads and direct mail advertising. These are two of the oldest methods still in use. Both use print media and are the easiest conventional advertising methods to produce. In a small town, using both methods may be overkill because statistics have shown that in most small towns most people subscribe to the local newspaper and newspaper ads are cheaper to produce than mail order straight. In larger cities, however, both methods would be needed to cover the entire city since the number of subscribers to the local newspaper is substantially smaller relative to the size of the population. In this example, the number of newspaper subscribers parameter is also used in the marketing plan.

Cluster marketing strategies analyze the target market using various combinations of geography, population densities, and personal parameters to develop geographic areas of interest. In marketing, these areas are called clusters or interest groups. Groups are identified so that single or multiple target markets are used for the advertising plan. Clusters (geographical areas) that have the same target market potential may be geographically close or hundreds of miles apart. With today’s mass communications, distance does not matter for the plans of the modern marketing executive.

Internet Cluster Market Strategies

The growth of the Internet has led to the development of a whole new dynamic in cluster marketing strategy. The Internet has consolidated many parameters. By way of example, the age groups have been narrowed down to children, young adults, adults, and seniors. Previously, these categories were covered in greater detail. Language is no longer a dominant value and clothing purchases are now measured individually instead of age groups. Search engines now create massive databases of the sites people visit and buy from.

Conventional marketing strategies develop “one-way” links from the ad to where the product can be purchased, while Internet marketing strategies develop “one-way” and “multiple” links to where all the sites where the product can be found. they sell the products. It also develops additional links to extensive content that describes everything we weren’t really interested in knowing about the products. That content also presents us with additional links to more content and numerous locations where the products can be found.

Marketing executives also have a lot of fun spending less money on advertising by offering affiliate programs where website owners advertise the product for free in hopes of earning a commission when the product is sold. A large number of affiliates means a large amount of free advertising.

All these aspects are increasing the dynamics of Cluster Marketing on the Internet. Demographic and sales data is accumulated in large databases and sold to marketers and advertisers for large amounts of dollars. These databases, in addition to very sophisticated analysis programs, provide many groups of possible marketing areas.

What about the internet entrepreneur?

While big money marketing executives slave away in their huge databases and numerous marketing groups, the Internet entrepreneur smiles like a “fox in the henhouse” and makes a lot of money without sophisticated group marketing strategies. The internet has made it possible for the entrepreneur to simplify the cluster marketing theory into a very simplistic model.

Let’s see some basic data:

1. Geographic clusters have become consolidated in an online world of the Internet. The Internet is the world and a huge number of people use it every day.
2. Search engines have cataloged the online world and continue to update that catalog every minute. Free tools are now available for Internet entrepreneurs to analyze that data on their laptops without having to pay for the use of that data.
3. Cluster demographics have been replaced with “keywords” and “long-tail keywords”.
4. Age demographics have been consolidated for children, adults, and seniors. Yes, even children are making a lot of money with their creative websites.
5. The corporate marketing executive is being replaced by young internet-savvy marketers and search engine optimization (SEO) content managers. These fresh young minds are racking up the dollars, even in a down economy.
6. “One-way links” are being replaced by “multi-way links” on web sales pages and bundled items.
7. Article directories and social networking sites provide massive amounts of FREE authoritative links to product sites that conventional marketers just can’t understand. These executives will soon be a relic in our modern Internet civilization.
8. Internet cluster marketing is no longer about geographic borders. The Internet entrepreneur has learned that on the Internet today methods and sites like EzineArticles, YouTube, FaceBook, Squidoo, HubPages, Twitter, Slideshare, etc. are grouped together, not demographic groupings. Also, countries still retain their own linguistic identity, but the Internet has broken down most of that barrier in Internet marketing. The web logs of every internet site are full of sources from all over the world attesting to the fact that the internet is now a global marketing group unto itself.

While large corporations have diversified into the Internet for several years, Internet group marketing strategies have made it possible for the individual in our society to earn more on the Internet than some of those large corporations.