| Now
that you have made an investment in time and money to set up a web site
for your company, its time to make that investment pay off in increased
business and contacts. The following hints will help you increase your
exposure on the internet and maximize returns on your investment in your
internet site.
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Don't
Forget! |
| 1. Start
to do Outbound E-mail advertising, in conjunction
with promotional efforts at your website. The synergies
are great.
2. Create
a Signature Block, and make sure that it is included
with all your e-mail messages, and postings to newsgroups.
3. Integrate
your internet promotional effort with your other
promotions, by putting your e-mail address and URL in all
your print and TV advertising. |
Just
another Medium of Communication
We need to start thinking
of the internet as another promotional vehicle much like the way TV,
newspapers, and radio are different promotional vehicles. Certain
segments of the
population are more likely to be on-line than others, so the same business
tools we use to identify and target advertising to specific population
segments that read papers or watch TV should be used in the case
of
the internet too.
As with any promotional effort,
an internet promotion needs to be integrated with all the other promotional
efforts that a company is undertaking. This means including your web
site and e-mail addresses in all of your print and TV ads, as well as
promoting your site on the internet itself. The importance of promoting
you web site in your other marketing activities can not be over emphasized.
Outbound
Advertising ... For Free!
E-mail is one of the least
expensive forms of communication today. The incremental cost of
sending e-mail is zero. It is amazing that more businesses have
not started to gather and organize their customer's e-mail addresses
in a database so that they can e-mail promotional material to their
customers. It can even be pitched as an environmentally friendly alternative
to junk mail. Outbound e-mail advertising, combined with an effective
web site can be extremely effective. The pay back for such a system
is very short.
Links
Everywhere
Links can be both purchased
and traded. Popular sites sell advertising space, either on a "per
view" or "per click" basis. Other sites will give free
links in exchange for you setting up a link to their site on your site.
In either case, you are looking for maximum exposure to your target
audience, much as you would in other advertising mediums. You are probably
not going to advertise a teen age product in the Globe and Mail, but
you would think about putting it on Much Music.
Integrate
your web presence with your other marketing efforts
Make sure that you integratge
your web site in all your other marketing efforts. When you do
print,
radio, or TV advertising, make sure that your web address is prominent
in the advertising, so that you potential customers can easily
find
out more information about your company and/or your products.
As well, The signature block
(or SIG) that you put at the end of every e-mail message you send, should
be advertising for you every time someone in your company sends an email.
At the very least you should have the name of the company that you are
associated with and your e-mail address where people can reach you if
they have questions about your company. As well, you should have a one
liner about what your company does, plus its Web Site address for people
to use if they are interested in learning more about your products and
services. For example here is my personal Signature block:
..................................................
Rich McCue
rich.mccue@msystems.net
http://www.msystems.net
Ph: 250.889.6160
..................................................ng
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