Making the Internet work for Marketing
It's fair to say that virtually every business big enough not to be classified as a “neighborhood” enterprise can benefit from using the Internet. Even businesses that you might think would be firmly rooted in older, more traditional ways of doing business with older, less technically oriented consumers have learned to use interactive marketing to their advantage.
Recently, for example, I had an opportunity to meet with a company that sells seeds and plants via mail order, and has been doing so for more than a century. The business mainly lives off its house file of existing catalog buyers. It’s difficult and expensive to find new people with both an enthusiasm for gardening and a propensity to buy plants via mail order rather than going to the “box stores,” such as Home Depot, Wal-Mart or the local nursery. While it’s hard to generalize about any company’s customer base without actually looking at the data, it’s probably reasonable to assume that this universe skews toward older, female consumers. That’s not exactly a “sweet spot” for interactive marketing, at least intuitively, yet this company gets 40% of its sales from its Web site. Certainly, they’re doing something right.
Examples like this are not unusual. Thousands of “traditional” businesses have seen their mix of business change dramatically as they have embraced the interactive channel.
In order to make the medium work for you, there’s a single fact about the Web that you need to burn into your brain: The Internet is a reactive medium. To put it into the context of other media you have available to communicate your brand, your offers and your key selling proposition, it’s way more like the Yellow Pages than it is like television or direct mail. The companies that use Yellow Pages successfully follow some really simple rules:
- They do everything they can to make themselves easy to find. Why else do you think locksmiths call themselves “AAAA-AA Lock and Safe Co.” and plumbers become “AA-Aardvark Plumbers”? They do that so their Yellow Pages listings will be at the front of the category. Other companies that don’t have the luxury of naming their businesses to suit the way people look for information in the Yellow Pages buy large display ads with red headlines or include themselves in the coupons that are sometimes bound in the phone book. Personal injury attorneys often buy a full-page, full-color ad on the back cover. It takes a boatload of successful whiplash litigation to pay for that, but it’s worth it because visibility counts for everything in the Yellow Pages.
- They limit the copy in their ads to information that the reader is likely to be looking for, and they don’t clutter it with irrelevancies. If they do talk about who they are, they focus on the things that really matter to people using the Yellow Pages to find someone, like how many years they’ve been in business or what part of town their service area includes.
- They make it very easy to find the one thing people are most likely to be looking for – their phone number. It’s always in big, bold type, and it dominates the ad.
Guess what? The same things work on the Internet! If your Web site is easy to find and presents only the information that visitors are likely to be seeking, and you make it easy to respond or buy, you’ll do very well. Conversely, if you design the site to please your CEO or think of it as “electronic collateral,” it probably won’t generate much by way of real business for you.
Taken from the book, The Business of Database Marketing (Racom, 2006) by Richard N. Tooker, VP Solutions Architect at KnowledgeBase Marketing. For more information about the book, visit Racom Publishing.
