Remember those Super Bowl and World Cup commercials where you saw
talking hand puppets, scantily dressed women, cowboys herding cats
and crude lettering on cardboard? Can you actually name one.com
company that paid for these millions of dollar/eurodollars for brand
awareness ads?
Doesn't this type of marketing remind you of a IPO.com
frenzied "drunken sailor school of budgeting" – meaning, spend like a
drunken sailor hitting his/her first port of call in years, with no
thought other than "brand awareness" coming to mind? Got the picture
yet? Want the cliff notes to the rest of my article? Three words
repeated from my header – "target customers online."
Some do and don'ts, with the do's first:
1)Think digital marketing – use keywords your customers may punch in
to a search engine to find your site throughout your overall online
and offline marketing processes. This forces you to stay focused on
your customer niche and ensures context relevancy for your web site.
The latter is becoming critical to garner high rankings on Alta
Vista, Google and Inktomi.
2)Advertise cost-effectively online where your customers go - this
doesn't have to be top tier web sites (more expensive typically); but
can be second or third tier community sites. Use online media buying
to save money; look at One Media Place, formerly Ad Auction for some
unsold inventory and bid with the best of them for a deal!
http://www.onemediaplace.com
3)Feature opt-in e-mail as a centerpiece of your marketing campaign –
now is the time to negotiate a 90-120 day media plan with some of the
market leaders. Yes Mail (one of our favorites) is offering a
discount of 10-30%. And, use HTML rich media, your ad copy will look
much better, in turn driving a better clickthrough results; but only
if you are a B2C if B2B then don't use HTML, just plain text.
4)Immerse your business with the online community – post to
Newsgroups announcing a special online contest, promotion or giveaway
that builds over a finite period of time. Get those geeks talking in
the virtual world – remember the truism of good PR, any PR is better
than no PR.
5)Ask your existing customers where they would recommend your
advertising to reach them online. Everybody likes to have their
opinions valued – so reach out and ask for their input, you'll be
pleasantly surprised.
6)Think and act like a guerrilla marketing type –
incorporate "guerrilla marketing" techniques to drive your business
in unique ways. Go to the source, the guy who coined the term and
many of the processes, Jay Conrad Levinson http://www.gmarketing.com
Ready for some don'ts?
1.Don't use TV, Radio or Billboards unless you have lots of money to
spend (read millions typically). Yes, they work to develop brands,
but be aware of the disconnect factor when you are trying to reach
online customers. When was the last time you jumped up from the TV
set to write down a URL you saw splashed across a screen or stopped
your car driving down your local boulevard when you saw a billboard
that caught your attention? Not very often!
2.Don't pay top dollar for banner advertising – negotiate a good deal
for yourself and don't believe the sales rep when they tell you all
inventory is sold out! There is lots of unsold inventory out there,
just look at the number of "house ads" (done for the company who owns
the site and published on their site) being run on many web sites. Do
some old-fashioned digital horse-trading and leverage your media buy!
3.Don't base your business on the "high tide raises all boats
model" – there is definitely a storm brewing and we don't mean just
at your local movie theater with George Clooney starring (sorry
ladies). We are telling our clients to batten down the hatches and
leverage their marketing dollars as much as possible - the party is
over, time to get down to building viable business models based on
selling tangible goods and services.
4.Don't use biz speak verbiage in your marketing processes - if I
see another site that has "first mover advantage" quoted throughout
the site I am going back to the radio for news/information. Be real,
tell people what you do, how you do it and what the value is based
on – enabling them to quickly (it's the web……..) understand what your
business is all about.
About the Author
Lee Traupel has 20 plus years of marketing experience He is the co-
founder of a Northern California and Brussels Belgium based,
privately held, Marketing Services and Software Company, Intelective
Communications, Inc. http://www.intelective.com