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.
