A 10-Step Process That Generates Results
The wrong approach to Internet marketing is to take your existing marketing materials, scan them, dump them on a Web page and walk away. You won't reach many prospects, and those who you do encounter won't be too impressed. Here is a 10-step process to help implement marketing that generates more positive results. You can read more here
1. Investigate and analyze the Net as a marketing medium. We're talking hands-on experience here. Reading a book (or this article, for that matter) will not give you a clear understanding of how the Internet works and how to use it effectively as a marketing tool. Grab a keyboard and jump in.
2. Define your Internet objectives to fit with your other marketing efforts. Treat Internet marketing as a supplement to your existing, traditional marketing methods, not as a substitute. There are few markets in either the consumer or business-to-business arenas that offer enough Internet penetration for you to go all-Internet and drop other methods of marketing communications.
Don't expect the Internet to do everything. It won't. You will still need salespeople. You will still need customer service. You will still need other forms of marketing communications. And, more than ever, you will need to coordinate all parts of your marketing effort so they all reinforce your movement toward your overall goals. Don't let the pretty little Web pictures make you lose sight of the more important big picture of your business objectives.
3. Determine how you want your prospect to respond. We are not talking some generality like "have warm, fuzzy feelings about our company." That is vague and useless. Instead, be specific. Where do you want your prospect to go? What do you want that prospect to do? What steps, in what specific order? How will you measure if your prospect has done this? If your prospect's response isn't measurable in some way, you will never know if your Internet marketing works or not.
4. What is your competitive advantage? You should already know this. It should be one, short, memorable sentence. Short, because Internet people move quickly. A typical Generation X male Internet user paying $3 an hour to use the Internet (some pay more), will not sit still long enough to wade through two screens of boilerplate to find out just what (if anything) makes your company different from its competitors.
And, please don't say something vague like "People helping people help people." Yuck! Be specific. Computer Literacy Bookshops offers "the world's largest selection of computer books." That's short and tells you how that company differs from the rest. Don't worry about being cute. Just be clear.
You need to know your competitive advantage before you plan your Internet marketing so your Internet projects can all reinforce that advantage.
5. What are the key benefits of your product or service that most sharply convey that advantage? Again, you should already know this. For Internet marketing, you may want to look at your key benefits from a different angle. Which benefits would be most important to a prospect who uses the Internet? This may cause you to reorder some priorities in a way that will make more impact on the Net.
6. Outline how you will communicate those benefits and your competitive advantage. Will you use a World Wide Web server? Will you build a customer mailing list? What Internet tools will you use?
7. Figure out what information you need to present. You can Internetize listings of dealers, contact information for sales reps, data sheets, support information. If you keep up-to-date product information on your Net site, your distributors and resellers have uninterrupted access to the facts they need to promote and sell your products.
Look at the information you already have and look at what new information you could create. When starting out, don't go overboard. Select only the most important information that would be easiest to deliver on the Net. Look for the information that will generate the biggest results and for what is most do-able.
8. Turn it into digital versions. The cost of presenting information on the Internet is influenced by how much information your company already has on disk. If you have the information you need already in electronic format from your catalogs, press releases, product specifications or newsletters, it's easy to copy the information to your Internet server. Don't get too elaborate. Start simple.
Note that if you have a lot of information, an FTP server or Gopher server can be easier to set up than a World Wide Web server. To create a file for FTP or Gopher, your information just needs to be in the common ASCII format. For the Web, someone needs to translate all documents into HTML.
9. Put your information on the Internet. Put your files in one directory on your server (give them helpful filenames; Z9893422.txt doesn't give your customers a clue) and name it something easy to remember. As your content grows, open up subdirectories under your main directory or add new Web pages. Add some free stuff. Giveaways are a cheap way of generating goodwill among the Internet community, and also good "word-of-net" publicity.
10. Promote, promote, promote. Remember, most Internet sites -- especially Web pages -- are undervisited. If you want yours to be a winner, you need to put your e-mail address and home page address on your business cards, letterhead, advertisements and brochures. Make your Internet addresses as prominent as your 800 number. Publicize your site to print media and to electronic publications on the Internet.
This article is excerpted with permission from "How To Grow Your Business On The Internet," by Vince Emery. For information on how to order the 428-page book from its publisher, The Coriolis Group, call 800/410-0192 or send e-mail to coriolis.com. Price: $24.99.
Internet Marketing Guidelines
Theses guidelines are suggested by the New York office of Ogilvy & Mather Direct, whose Interactive Marketing Group is highly regarded for creating interactive advertisements.
"Unbridled commercialization will likely crush what is most precious about the Internet," says the Group. "These guidelines are offered as a starting point towards the responsible participation of marketers on the Internet."
1. Intrusive e-mail is not welcome. No one should receive a message they haven't either asked to receive or, more generally, want to receive. If a user requests information from companies that sell ski equipment, the companies within this category should be able to send this user relevant information. They may offer to add the user's address to this list server, but under no circumstances should an inquiry result in an automatic subscription.
2. Internet consumer data is not for resale without the expressed permission of the user. Unlike commercial services, where it is clearly understood that data generated through consumer interaction is being sold to marketers, Internet data should remain the private property of the user. Using the ski example, the fact that I have requested information via the Internet should not de facto allow the ski company to resell my behavioral data to, say, SAAB -- which may be interested in reaching ski enthusiasts.
3. Advertising is allowed only in designated newsgroups and list servers. The most objectionable form of advertising on the Internet comes in the form of off-topic commercial postings to newsgroups and list server conferences, usually cross-posted to dozens or hundreds of groups. These postings generally draw harsh flames from readers, but such feedback may not be sufficient to stop this type of abuse. Those who post off-topic commercial solicitations should be warned once, then filtered at the source from any commercial postings.
4. Promotions and direct selling are allowed, but only under full disclosure. Marketers should be free to offer promotions from their own domains, but users should be given the opportunity to clearly review the rules, guidelines and parameters of the event before they commit. Promotions should be subjected to the same guidelines as above -- all promotions should be self-selected.
We suggest the recommendations be consistent with those developed for analog merchants by the Direct Marketing Association, and modified or enhanced to reflect the unique attributes of electronic delivery.
5. Internet communications software must never hide concealed functions. Several years ago, a commercial online service was accused of using its terminal software to scan users' hard disks for text that appeared to be an address. The program would then allegedly collect this data and, unknown to the user, send it to the service for use in compiling mailing lists. As client/server applications become more prevalent on the Internet, the opportunity for abuse increases.
The Business-To-Business Business
Although I took an eight-year leave to practice direct marketing to consumers, for most of my career I have lived in the world of business-to-business direct marketing. Because this is my exclusive arena these days, I seldom consciously think about the differences between it and consumer direct marketing. But as I watch an increasing number of companies embark on business-to-business direct marketing, I have become increasingly aware of how important it is to their success to understand some of the fundamental concepts. It is not unusual to find marketing programs that fail to produce the desired results because they were not designed for the business-to-business marketplace. Instead they were really consumer marketing programs targeted to businesses.
For this reason, and because it is sometimes helpful to get back to basics as a means of re-centering yourself, I decided to revisit the fundamental differences between business-to-business and consumer direct marketing. Although, as the chart on page 24 illustrates, there are numerous differences, this article focuses on three. Based on my experience, all three are both critical and frequently overlooked-especially when marketing to medium- and large-sized businesses.
Difference #1: How a customer or prospect is defined. At least three-quarters of the time when I ask business-to-business marketers to name a customer, they state the name of a corporation. Although a corporation may represent a customer on the financial reports, thinking of business customers as corporate entities rather than as individuals is probably the single greatest obstacle to successful business-to-business marketing. I do not know of a single company that has ever purchased anything. I do not know of a single corporation that has signed a check. Only people make purchases. The purchases may be made on behalf of a corporation, but they are still made by individuals.
When you mail to or telephone a residence, you will generally reach the individual you are targeting even if you do not know his or her name. This is also true of small Mom and Pop establishments-if you reach the address, you reach Mom and Pop. However, establishments do not have to be very large before mailings to their address will not make it out of the mailroom -- even with titles like "Vice President of..." This difficulty of reaching individuals inside organizations makes business-to-business marketing more difficult and more expensive than consumer marketing.
The problem is compounded by the fact that in all but the smallest corporations most purchases involve multiple individuals. These individuals generally tend to be grouped by functional or application areas. Together they influence the decision by providing input about the various dimensions of the proposed product or service such as the technology, economics, strategic fit and operational benefits.
When corporations rather than individuals inside the corporations are thought of as customers, key individual data is seldom captured. As a result, most corporations have only the names of the ship-tos and purchasing agents in their databases. Without individual customer data, however, it is impossible to proactively cultivate relationships and build loyalty.
Difference #2: The size of the universe of potential buyers. The universe for consumer products often consists of millions of names. However, it is not unusual for business-to-business universes to be comprised of fewer than 5,000 names. For very specialized products or services the total potential universe could be in the hundreds.
It is this difference in universe size that should discourage business-to-business direct markets from playing the same "numbers game" as their consumer counterparts. I say should because this fundamental difference seems to be ignored by far too many business marketers. Mass mailings or telemarketing blitzes to millions of names in order to acquire two new customers out of 100, at the risk of alienating, ignoring or losing the other 98, has substantially different consequences when there are only 5,000 individuals in the entire universe.
With niche products, increased competition and few growing markets, it is more important than ever for business-to-business marketers to value each individual in the target universe and approach the market in ways that strengthen relationships with as many prospects and customers as possible.
Difference #3: The need to focus on the relationship process rather than on the transaction. This third critical difference is more subtle than the first two. Although there are exceptions, consumer direct marketing tends to be transaction-focused. With little loyalty, limited product lines, small average order sizes and short buying cycles, consumer marketers often must make money from a single or relatively few purchases. These factors, combined with the tendency to "play a numbers game," drive a short-term campaign-based, transaction focus. If a relationship develops it is usually a by-product of a series of satisfactory transactions.
Conversely, more profitable business-to-business transactions are a by-product of a satisfactory relationship. Longer sales cycles, more complex products, solutions which first require correct diagnosing, and the need to establish trust and credibility are just a few reasons why the relationship process is critical. Focusing on relationships will almost always yield a greater understanding of the customer's needs, which will in turn contribute to the delivery of greater value and result in increased loyalty and profit. In addition, focusing on the relationship will significantly increase the supplier's probability of becoming a true partner. Focusing on transactions, however, tends to establish suppliers as "commodity vendors."
Although they are separate dimensions, each of these three differences shares a common denominator that is foundational to successful business-to-business direct marketing -- the customer as a highly valued individual with unique needs.
Consumer and business-to-business direct marketing have many similarities. They both produce measurable results and produce responses independent of location. They both use similar tools -- lists, telephones, databases, direct mail, targeting and tracking systems. But the applications of the tools, measurements and economics can be very different. Understanding the differences and properly applying the appropriate tools are critical for success in either arena.
RELATED ARTICLE: Consumer Marketing Vs. Business-To-Business Marketing
Consumer Marketing
* Individuals frequently buy for themselves
* Buying decision involves relatively few others
* Single buyer groups
* Singe locations
* Buying process is usually informal
* Average order size is relatively small
* Lifetime value is relatively low
* Easy to reach individuals
* Large target market universes
* Transaction-focused
Business-To-Business Marketing
* Individuals buy on behalf of an organization
* Decisions frequently involve multiple individuals
* Multiple buyer groups
* Multiple locations
* Buying process may be formal or informal
* Average order size tends to be large
* Lifetime value can be very large
* Difficult to reach individuals
* Small target audience universes
* Relationship process-focused
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