Low Budget Online Marketing For Small Business

From the Back Cover of "Low-Budget Online Marketing For Small Business"
Large companies have huge budgets for marketing their products and services online. What’s the difference between a $100,000 marketing campaign and a $1,000 campaign? Surprisingly, not much. This book teaches small-business operators how to achieve big-business marketing success on a small-business budget!

Low-Budget Online Marketing for Small Business takes you behind the scenes of successful marketing campaigns. This book will show you how to cut costs so that you can adapt the same successful marketing strategies that big companies use. If you are looking to attract attention to your company on the Web, this book will show you how, and with only a minimal investment!

The following topics are included in this book: - Targeting your campaign - Generating free advertising - E-mail marketing - Building Web communities - Successful co-branding strategies - Banner advertising - Web-design basics - Search-engine registration

About the Author of "Low-Budget Online Marketing For Small Business"
Holly Berkley has a stellar record in designing and implementing online marketing programs for large corporations. Her clients include some of the biggest names in business today. With this book, she now brings her knowledge of successful online marketing to the small-business world.

Excerpted from Low-Budget Online Marketing For Small Business by Holly Berkley. Copyright © 2003. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
What’s the difference between a $100,000 online marketing campaign and a $1,000 campaign? Surprisingly, not much. Sure, the six-figure campaign might have flashier graphics, well-known celebrities, or a more sophisticated data base to store and track all the market data, but the concepts behind the two campaigns are almost identical.

The rules of marketing are the same for any size of business: establish your brand, find your target audience, generate sales, and encourage repeat business. The Web lets you do all of these things for about one-tenth the cost of print and about one-thousandth the cost of television.

What Is Online Marketing?

So what exactly is online marketing? Online marketing is the process of putting your product or business in front of the more than the 200 million regular Internet users looking for services and information online. It is the process of turning your current Web site into a powerful medium to maximize your business and sales potential.

Online marketing is much more than buying ads online. It’s about how you communicate with your customers via e-mail, message boards, and chatrooms. It is about updating your Web site with important product information and offers. It is any kind of promotion your company does using the Internet.

The center of your online marketing efforts should be your Web site. The feelings consumers have when they visit your Web site carry over to how they perceive your entire company or organization. No matter how effective your marketing campaign is, if you don’t have a well-designed, professional-looking Web site, people will not buy from you. (See chapter 10 for details on improving the design of your Web site.)

The advantage of online marketing is that you don’t have to have a multimillion-dollar marketing budget to put together an effective campaign. There are now shopping cart templates, Web site templates, and even online marketing templates created by companies such as Yahoo! and msn that help companies with limited budgets get their e-business quickly off the ground. Also, because there is so much competition between Web designers and programmers right now, if you know the right questions to ask (see chapter 11 on working with Web developers), you can take very sophisticated online marketing strategies and implement them on almost any size budget.

Prerequisites for Successful Online Marketing

Before getting into the details and strategies of online marketing, here are some important factors to consider, among them human resources, the importance of consistent communication, and the need to buy online.

Adequate human resources

First, to succeed online, you must have real people working behind your Web site. No matter how sophisticated technology gets, Web sites don’t run themselves. It is the personal touches and quick responses to problems that make a Web site work and turn visitors into customers.

The standard acceptable time to return a business e-mail is 48 to 72 hours. Take any longer than that and you have most likely lost the customer. If you do not have the human resources to return e-mails in two to three business days, you need to rethink your online marketing strategy. Although there are several e-mail automation programs, you cannot depend on automated responses to answer your customer’s specific questions. Customers are still looking for that human touch, even through a computer monitor.

My husband and I learned this firsthand when we decided to start a travel Web site dedicated to Baja California, Mexico. Through our Web site, we offered services such as Mexican auto insurance (a necessity for any American driving across the border), hotel and airline reservations, and special products from Mexico such as clothing and artwork. We honestly thought that by posting a vast amount of information on our Web site such as travel tips, local events, laws, and so on, customers would get all the information they needed about traveling in Baja and the site would essentially run itself. We planned to travel Mexico while we watched the money from our Web site roll in. We couldn’t have been more wrong.

No matter how many links and stories we posted, we still received hundreds of e-mails from customers wanting more information — especially when it came to making a purchase. We were even reprimanded on our own message boards for not answering posts on a regular basis!

We learned right away that building a Web site does not eliminate the need for customer service. In fact, it should allow you to give better customer service. A common misconception exists among companies that creating a Web site replaces customer service. Although Web sites do help customers find information they need about your product or service, in the process, they can actually create a need for more human resources.

Consistent communication

How you reply to a customer’s e-mail is an extremely important part of online marketing. If you’ve spent the time and money to get a customer to look at your Web site, then contact you, it would be a shame to lose that potential customer just at the time when you could be closing a sale. E-mail is a cheap and highly effective way to generate and close sales, but consistency is key. Be sure your e-mails carry the same tone as your Web site. For example, if your Web site is fun and humorous, your e-mails should be written that way. If your company has a very corporate, serious brand, your e-mails should convey an equally professional tone.

Your brand should carry over to all your online communications, right down to your e-mail signature. In most e-mail programs, you can set up a personal e-mail signature that will automatically attach to all of your outgoing messages. All of your e-mails, whether sent to business associates, clients, or friends, should be signed with your business signature. An effective e-mail signature should include your full name, title, contact info, Web site address, and a couple of words explaining what you do. You can even add a couple of lines about a company promotion.