Recession-Proof Your Business With Online Marketing Part Three by Bob Regnerus
March 9th, 2009
Filed in: Online Marketing
This is the third article in the series by “leads king” Bob Regnerus. To read part two of the series go to http://tinyurl.com/av8otu.
Part Three: The Personal Touch
Everyone says the world economy is collapsing these days, but we all know that what it’s really doing is evolving. We’re in a painful phase of economic evolution, but the world is still spinning, and eventually the markets will start going up and the government will be done bailing out banks and manufacturers.
As I’ve mentioned in the first articles in this series, the new economy will be very different from the one we’re leaving behind. The companies which succeed in the new economy will be the ones which focus on innovation and find new ways to connect with their customers. Businesses which cling to 20th-century marketing and communication will go the way of the dinosaurs and the dodo bird.
Online marketing is the best way to keep your business going while the new economy takes its shape. With online marketing, you can monitor your spending and direct your resources toward the people who are most likely to buy from you. You can also use the Internet to provide the information your customers are looking for, collect information about your customers, and test new ways to attract your target audience. If you haven’t read them already, read the articles “Riding Out the Storm” and “Information Isn’t Everything, It’s the Only Thing” for more on those subjects.
In this article, I’ll talk about some of the choices you’ll need to make about your marketing budget, and I’ll tell you how the Internet can help you connect with your customers like never before.
The Great Extinction
Five or ten years ago, audiences and advertising dollars started moving away from the old media and toward the Internet. Television, radio, and newspapers (especially newspapers) were in trouble even before the economy took a turn for the worse. That shift is happening faster now, and you should think long and hard about the money you’re spending on the traditional outlets.
None of the older media can compete with the Internet’s ability to transfer massive amounts of information, instantly, to or from any place on the globe. Television networks, radio broadcasters, and newspaper publishers have all recognized that fact and started moving their products to the Internet—that’s why you can now watch your favorite sitcom, listen to your favorite radio station, and read your local newspaper on your computer.
The problem, at least for those old media operators, is that instead of having a near-monopoly on their market segment, they get lost in the shuffle of thousands of competing websites. None of them are making the kind of money they used to make, and many are going out of business. It’s especially bad for newspapers, because their main source of revenue—classified ads—are irrelevant to consumers who can use free sites like Craigslist to sort through a larger pool of offers with more information.
What this means for you is that continuing to spend money on traditional advertising may be throwing good money after bad. Fewer and fewer of your customers are seeing those ads, but you have to spend the same amount of money creating the ads and almost as much to run them. Internet advertising, on the other hand, gives you access to an ever-growing audience and a wide range of inexpensive outlets.
You may not be ready to shift all of your marketing dollars to the Internet, but it’s time to start thinking in that direction. And even if you do cut off all your other marketing efforts, you may still find yourself advertising with your old TV, radio, or newspaper operators—most of them sell advertising space on their websites through Google or another second party, so you may reach the same audience with no extra effort!
The Only Two-Way Street in Town
Here’s another reason to move away from traditional media: only the Internet gives your customers the ability to engage in a two-way conversation with you. Television, radio, and newspapers are strictly one-way channels, and today’s consumers are looking for a more personal experience.
Of course, there are other ways of engaging in a dialogue with your customers. To be exact, there are two other ways: phone conversations or face-to-face interaction. Both methods are effective at creating a bond between you and the customer, but what’s the downside? They’re expensive. To maintain either one, you have to hire people to answer the phone, staff a storefront, or go on sales calls. If you use the Internet, you can keep up your side of a conversation on your own time, or you can use “autoresponder” software to do the work for you.
Conversations about your business also help, even if you’re not directly involved in them. The Internet helps you generate more buzz among your customers, because it’s easier for people to find you after they’ve heard something about you. If one happy customer puts a link to your website on a blog or Facebook page, you could get dozens or even hundreds of new sales leads because of it. If you don’t have a website (or you haven’t promoted it), all that happy customer can do is mention your name, and all you can do is hope that other people will do the work to find you.
The Ultimate Tool
The Internet gives you the ultimate tool to maintain personal contact with your customers: email. In Chapter 9 of my book Big Ticket eCommerce, I describe how to use a permission-based email campaign to generate traffic for your website and turn your sales leads into customers. Companies which use email to communicate with their customers today have a competitive advantage—it’s as simple as that. In hard economic times, when your competitors are fighting you for every dollar, can you afford to pass up an opportunity?
Email is effective because it’s personal. Your message isn’t just displayed on a wall or billboard or TV screen for anyone to see—it arrives in your customer’s personal inbox, and if you’ve done it right, it addresses the customer by name. Since it’s such a personal mode of communication, you have to be extra careful about how you use it. You don’t want to use email for a hard sell, you don’t want to send too many emails in too short a time, and you NEVER want to sell your customers’ addresses to anyone else. Any one of those will get you flagged as a spammer and hurt your efforts with all of your customers.
Another great thing about email is that your competitors most likely will not see it. They can watch what you do with your website, and they can look at what you post in forums and on social networking sites, but unless they are totally on top of things, they’ll probably never see what you email to your customers. As I’ve said before, in this economy, you have to take every opportunity to separate yourself from the competition.
In the conclusion to this series, “You Can Afford To Do It, And You Can’t Afford Not To,” I’ll tell you how to put together an effective online marketing campaign with little or no money, and I’ll tell you what you’re missing if you’re slow to make the move.
Bob Regnerus is the creator of the Big Ticket eCommerce System™, a four-step process that helps businesses with complex or high-priced products and services maximize their sales using the internet. Utilizing the proven methods of this system, he has created thousands of websites, attracted more than 35 million website visitors and generated 2.2 million leads for clients in more than 30 industries. To get a FREE copy of Big Ticket eCommerce sent to you by mail, visit http://www.FreeBigTicket.com right now.
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