|
|
Marketing
No matter what business you're in, you probably need to do a bit of marketing to get your product or service into the consciousness of your customers. These days, the Internet is leveling the playing field in such a way as to enable the smallest company to compete equally against the biggest company, without huge outlays of cash.
This page discusses some principles of effective marketing and provides links to good marketing resources.
Good practice
Effective marketing relies on some basic principles:
- Know who and where your market is: Some market analysis will help you find out who your prime market is and where they are located. Once you have that figured out, you can then effectively direct your message to an audience that is likely to respond.
- Choose the right channel: Decide what the most effective method of communicating your message might be: for instance, you could underwrite a program on public radio, buy an ad spot on commerical radio or tv, take out a newspaper ad, prepare a boxholder mailing, produce a brochure or rack card, write a press release, build a website, or send a marketing email.
- Build a reputation: Of course, you need to back up your marketing claims with great service, product availability, price and delivery reliability. Reputations are built one customer at a time.
Internet Marketing
The Internet and world wide web have changed how you can market your product or service. But simply putting a website together that explains your product or service and allows people to order from you is not enough. You have to use the Internet and traditional channels to get the word out to your targeted audience.
- Get placed on search engines: selfpromotion.com is a free service that allows you to promote your website to most of the top search engines. It's a one-stop, 10 minute process to get the word about your website out to the world.
- Get linked from other websites: as important as being findable on search engines is being linked to from other sites that might relate to your business. For instance, if you are in the tourism business, you definitely need to be linked to from http://haines.ak.us, the Haines Convention and Visitors Bureau website. All it takes is getting hold of the webmaster at the site you want to be linked from and requesting a link. Sometimes, you might be charged for a link, but before you pay, check references from other folks who have paid for links to their sites. Most often, you will be asked to create a reciprocal link (a link from your website to their website).
- Put yourself in your customer's shoes: surf the web looking for your product or service as if you were your own customer. If you find areas of weakness (for example, you don't show up on a Yahoo search) focus your efforts to make sure you do show up.
- Publicize your URL: Your URL, or web address, should appear on every single bit of printed material you send out. Print it on your sign, on your car, on your card, on your letterhead, have it on your answering machine, etc. Make sure your email has a signature containing your URL and contact information so that every email you send out displays your business contact information.
- Be creative and keep up the effort: marketing on the web requires constant effort. It is no longer good enough to work hard on setting up a site and promoting it to the search engines and then just sitting back. You need to be creative and provide a sustained effort in order to stay ahead of the pack. Viral marketing, a method of marketing that forces people to spread the word (by providing incentives for doing so) is a very effective way of getting the word out.
- The Internet Marketing Institute's Special Report on Search Engine Optimization
An excellent summary of what it takes to get highly placed on search engines.
General Marketing Resources
|
|