domain namessite promotion
marketing strategy
marketing strategy
A business constantly endeavours to achieve three broad objectives; increasing profits, reducing costs and improving communications.
As a low cost entry publishing and marketing medium, a carefully conceived web presence can play an important role in achieving these objectives and needs to be considered within any business strategy.
For all types of business; home-based, mobile, retail outlet, service and manufacturing, the opportunities are there. Small, medium or large businesses with either local concentrated markets or distant dispersed markets, can take advantage.
But what are the opportunities and how should a business incorporate its Internet activity within all of its other activities? Firstly, let's look at those opportunities and then we can start to set some priorities and formulate a strategy.
Increasing profits
- Another sales channel
- Greater customer convenience
- Better sales conversions
- More upgrade sales
- Reach new markets at reasonable cost
- Increase customer retention
A web presence allows you a whole new way to reach existing and prospective customers. A tireless 24 hour worker for your business, your web site delivers the information your customers need to make purchasing decisions and is a great interactive sales tool.
Tackle the challenge of developing new markets with confidence and at a cost unthinkably low just a few years ago. Staying much closer to your customers can lead to better retention and upgrade business.
Reducing costs
- Reduce telephone costs
- Reduce printing and postage costs
- Reduce support costs
- Reduce advertising costs
- Improve business processes
By using your web site to provide information on your business and your offerings, you don't have to devote so much of your resource to simply answering the phone. Delivering even a proportion of pre-sales, support and contact information via the web can reduce costs both in time and call charges.
With your web site to interactively deliver product and service information, you can lessen the burden of brochure printing and postage costs. Remember you don't need a reprint each time you change a specification or price either.
For some communications, telephone, face to face and printed materials are absolutely right but with a web presence you have more options. Focus your communication energies where they are most needed and choose the medium which is best suited to the situation.
For many businesses, well targeted traditional advertising such as newspaper and radio can sometimes be effective but potentially costly. It can be hard to experiment without making a large commitment and any feedback on success can be slow.
A well designed web site can be flexible and provide a depth of information not otherwise available. It becomes possible the refine your offer via your web site, monitoring feedback before making any large commitments to traditional advertising.
Furthermore, the web provides its own opportunities to run online advertising campaigns using highly targeted web based ads. These provide a taster, driving traffic to your web site which is ready to provide the detail.
Improving communications
- Improve business image
- Enhance existing marketing
- Customers need better information
- Public relations opportunities
- Release time sensitive materials
- Test market new products and services
- Obtain feedback
- Cross language barriers
With a quality web presence you have the opportunity to harmonise your marketing efforts and develop new interactive ways of engaging customers. Accurate time-sensitive information can be made available with a level of detail appropriate to the circumstances.
You can provide a whole range of useful information to help customers understand your business and your offerings. Typical choices are service descriptions, product specifications, configuration options, answers to common support problems, news updates and contact information.
There is no need to restrict your message to just customers. The press, employees, prospective employees, suppliers, industry experts and trade associations may all have an interest in what you have to say. There can be great opportunities to generate positive word of mouth recommendations allowing your web site's visitors to react more favourably to your next contact.
By involving interested parties in your development plans, you have the chance to test market new products and services and gain valuable feedback, improving the offering before finally committing.
Providing translations of your site's most important pages allows international markets to receive your message in their own language.
Priorities
- Consider your market
- Consider your product or service
- Interactions with audience
- Their involvement in your activities
- The broad objectives
Setting a few priorities makes it a lot easier to see how to use your web presence to best advantage and how it integrates into your business. To help identify those priorities, it's worth considering some general points about your business.
Consider the characteristics of your market. Do you customers come from your local area or much further away? Is the market concentrated in some way by geography, common interest or need or is it more dispersed? Are you a new entrant to the market?
Is your product or service generalised or specialised? Is it a completely new idea or something which has been around for a while? Is it easy for people to understand what you offer?
Naturally you want customers and prospective customers to know about your activities but are there are other groups you want to interact with? Reaching the press, employees, prospective employees, suppliers, industry experts and trade associations may also be worthwhile.
As well as sales, are there other areas of your business where you might want to involve your audience? Would it be useful to invite customers to contribute ideas for new developments or improvements? Is there any advantage to test marketing a new offering to a small group of customers? With access to the right materials, can customers answer their own support questions?
Some businesses might focus initially on just one of the broad objectives; increasing profits, reducing costs or improving communications, while others look for a blend of all three.
August 2002 - S.B.