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I am a strong proponent of the World Wide Web.
Since the beginning of my involvement with the web in 1994, to today, the
Internet has been a significant part of my day-to-day personal life and business
life. It's also made me a lot of money, fantastic contacts and given me
access to a incredible amount of once difficult to obtain information.
If I need quick and accurate news or market information, I go to the
web. If I want to publish information and make it available to whomever I
wish quickly and inexpensively, I go to the web. Very often, if I want to
make a purchase I either research it online first, or I actually just buy it
over the web. I'm just one of tens-of-millions who have integrated the web
into their day-to-day activities. And thousands more join the revolution
every day. This is the fastest growing communications medium in man's history,
how can you not be a part of it? As a marketer, you cannot afford to ignore the World
Wide Web and it's powerful, scalable, and low-cost benefits.
For you, the business manager, the web offers a
combination of powerful, yet very distinct and different potential benefits.
On the commerce side of the equation, the web offers:
 | A place where people can electronically go to find out basic information about
your business, your hours, your location, and ways to contact you. You can
include interactive maps that help the customer find your business address,
and detailed information about your products/services. |
| You can offer special "web only" based promotions to prompt
customers to visit the site repeatedly and to use the specials as a way to
drive customers to you. |
| With database integration, you could offer your entire "catalog"
of products/services on line as a convenience for your customers and
motivate them to do business with you. |
| If you elect to incorporate the basic elements of e-commerce into your web
activities you can conduct real-time credit card and checking account transactions
over digitally secured transaction systems. |
| You can "mine' the data obtained from site visitors to further define
your target markets and demographic customer profile. |
| The site can be used to proved another channel of communication with your
customers (and vendors) and provide in return, superior customer response. A
customer with a complaint who has that complaint satisfied usually shows
more brand loyalty than your typical repeat customer. |
On the marketing side of the equation, you also have the following benefits:
| The web offers a tremendous amount of valuable and relevant data for the
marketer. Thousands of sites, both public and privately owned and
operated, provide free or low-cost access to demographic data, trend
analysis, market conditions and much more. The problem is developing
your "search engine" skills in order to efficiently find the information
you need among the billions of gigabytes of data available online. |
| Very often, your competition has a web presence where you can get a sense
of their strategy, their attention to detail and technique, and so on. Visit
the web sites of your competitors, and do so "stealthily" using a
free service like anonymizer or silent-surf.
They'll never know you were there. |
| If you properly mine the data on exactly who is visiting your site,
where they are going and what they are doing during their visit, you can
develop a whole new demographic profile and undercover potential new
secondary markets you never anticipated. |
On the advertising side, the potential is tremendous:
| The web allows for a degree of targeted marketing that is unique for an
electronic medium, which until now had to rely primarily on mass marketing methodologies.
You can make cooperative arrangements for banner and interstitial ads to run
on the sites of businesses and organizations that compliment yours or are
specifically utilized by your target markets, for example. |
| You can join cooperative banner advertising groups that run each others
banner ads on the others sites on a rotating basis. In some cases, the
groups can have your banners run in near-target specific areas of the
member's networks only in return for targeted ads running on your
site. |
| Search engine optimization techniques allow the savvy site operator to be
indexed on the engines with automated engine ratings comparable to companies
that might be a hundred times larger than theirs. This is a
method of web advertising that is woefully under-utilized, yet the access to
the engines and the technology that drives them is available to all.
That's probably because there is a lot of work to be done, completing
numerous online forms, developing site specific code, and keeping all of
your information up to date by re-listing repeatedly etc. You might
want to consider an outside agency for this kind of work, if it is in your
budget. My firm, Web Target
Marketing Group, Inc., offers engine optimization among its wide variety
of services. |
| E-Mail Advertising is a very popular and low-cost method of getting your
message in front of thousands of people quickly and inexpensively. The key
is to avoid being a "spammer" and learning the techniques, the
legalities and basic etiquette of proper email marketing. |
| You can use vehicles like free email newsletters specific to your target
markets and distribute them via email lists from reputable list brokers.
However, the information you provide must be interesting, accurate, relevant
and compelling or the user will cancel their free subscription. |
| You can "piggy-back" advertising in some of the
newsletters that have developed regular online subscriber-audiences that
number in the tens of thousands. With a bit of forethought and
common-sense, you could hit a gold mine if you fall into a publication that
is favored by your target markets. The key here is to understand what you
are paying for and to get the best deal you can. This is a new medium,
it should be very inexpensive to test here. At least relatively inexpensive
when compared to other traditional advertising mediums. I doubt this
will remain the case forever, but that is the way it is today and hopefully,
you can take advantage of the unique opportunity these times and the
Internet present to you. |
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