On-Line Marketing Strategies
These days an internet marketing strategy plays a vital role in the overall marketing plan of any small business. Getting your website viewed is important for any size business – large or small.
Remember: You can’t put up a terrific web site on-line and “hope” that people will just arrive. You have to let your prospects know, IN EVERY POSSIBLE WAY, that your web site is there. This HAS to be part of any Internet Marketing Strategy you develop. This is actually a basic marketing principle. Unless you have something as needed and wanted as the original and authentic Fountain of Youth, your customers are not going to look for you; you have to look for them.
There is a lot of hullabaloo about promoting your web site. In fact, building traffic to your web site is the subject of thousands of web sites, e-zines, books, courses and seminars. Using the web to promote your site, however, still assumes that your customers are surfers. Even though you may be an avid internet user, there is a large percentage of our population that are not as savvy with the internet as we would like them to be.
So, what do you do about this large percentage of the population who are not internet adept? They will only find out about you through traditional marketing and public relations media. This is particularly true if you serve a fairly local market. Fortunately these are the easiest and cheapest prospects for you to reach off-line.
Off-Line Marketing Strategies
Off-Line Internet Marketing Strategies are still alive. I recently read a statistic of the US Postal Service that stated that consumers spend an average of 25 minutes with Direct Mail and 30 minutes with catalogs. (There are more facts in the Mail Moment series of free white papers form the USPS.) Yes, they may go through their mail like Speed Racer and cull through the mail they want and the mail they don’t want at record velocity; but those that catch their eye and grab their attention, they actually read and spend time doing so.
You need to tap into that market and utilize that statistic. Become part of that pile of mail that your prospective consumer spends time reading. Direct Mail should be a pivotal point of your on-line marketing strategy. You need to ensure that you have a direct mail marketing campaign to drive traffic to your web site.
Other Marketing Avenues
Below is a small list of some of the ways to make your web site known (this list was taken directly from the Traffic Building Volume of Ken Evoy’s brilliant book, Make Your Site Sell!):