Web Marketing

Never Follow the Crowd

You can sell anything online. But not all businesses can realise enough online product revenue to justify the cost of a web site. If your products are traditionally sold via in-person sales calls or factory visits where the credibility of brick and mortar and the press the flesh relationship is key to the sale, then it will take an exceptional web site to fill that requirement. If your products are fragile, heavy, or bulky, the cost of shipping long distances might make the total sale cost too high, thus selling on other than a regional basis might not yield proper return on your investment. And if your product is not differentiated from a local product, why would the prospect want to wait for delivery?

But if the products are electronic in nature such as software or even travel arrangements (tickets through reservations), or you are soliciting clients of unique services (such as a river rafting guide service on the Colorado River or a Bread & Breakfast Inn), then making it easier for information to reach the prospect may significantly increase sales. Certainly, any product that is purchased at a distance via the telephone or via the mail can be adapted to the Web. If offering 24 hour access to purchasers of your product at little incremental cost is an advantage, then the Web is for you. And sometimes you need a Web presence, just like a yellow pages ad, just to keep from losing market share.

Simply put, the more unique your product is and the more unique your target market is, the better you will do online. The less that you differentiate your product or the less focused your target market, the poorer you will do online. Common products do not do well online. And selling a niche product to a mass market has never been shown to be effective. Fortunately, the Web offers characteristics of niche markets for niche products at volumes that justify Web efforts. The key is marketing. The book, Making Money In Cyberspace is recommended reading, and at around $12 it is worth the effort to get it.

Web marketing is evolving at an exceptional rate and the ability to remain current continues to give clients remarkable advantage. The ability to review technology from a development point of view, then from a sales and marketing point of view, is a real advantage in any marketing organization. Just speaking the same language is important.

It is clear that the Internet is exploding. You cannot avoid stories in every written media about the electronic phenomenon that is grabbing the user and business communities by storm. Everybody with a computer has probably been on the Internet or other on-line service, or will be within a few months.

This interest in the Internet has resulted from the transformation of the technology from it's prior primitive techno-nerd command line cryptic system into a system usable (albeit slowly) by a novice. Curiosity is addictive, especially when the tool is graphic, interactive, and fully multi-media. Current growth projections expect continued user community expansion at up to 40% per month. [The current rate of growth is about 2½ new internet users each minute.] As the access to information continues to grow, and the number of users increases exponentially, the transformation that will result is sure to rock absolutely every industry, even those not a part of what is considered the computer industry. We have stumbled into the Information Age.

Well over half of the Fortune 500 companies have not only launched but have embraced a Web presence. There are many compelling reasons to have a presence, but the major reason is a cross between self defense and the holy grail of the Information Highway. Consumers are plugging into the Web with increasing frequency to gain information about products they intend to purchase. If you do not have a Web presence then you are losing market share.

But even though the Web is considered an emerging technology, there are comparisons to traditional retail strategies that should be considered. Consider the advantage that small businesses received when they chose to relocate to shopping malls from neighborhood streets. The access to tens of thousands of shoppers en masse allowed the business to prosper. Those businesses that chose not to relocate to the visibility of a mall lost market share to their competitors that did relocate. In the case of the Web, the competitive advantage of one company over another is also a case of location and access to users en masse. As in all other cases, the "if you build it they will come" attitude will lead to disaster if nobody knows the product exists.

Even within the Web, success is linked to visibility and user traffic. To get the greatest number of users "visiting" your products and company, you need to be in the direct path taken by these users to buy the products. This is the lesson learned by the banks that have chosen to open branches in grocery stores. Place your products where people can be found, and business increases. The award winning Web pages, Internet malls, and Shareware depositories have become the most significant traffic centers on the Web, accommodating millions of users per day without effort. Having visibility in those high traffic centers is vital to any company wishing to sell their products and establish dominance in a market.

As this migration to the Internet continues, the marketing and advertising issues become clearer. Be on the Web, or be left out. And on the Web, be conspicuous to your target consumers or fail. And, seemingly, you can be too conspicuous. Behave as a leader, and you will become a leader. Do it too often or without style and fail. It is a two-edged sword, and it is best handled by only the most experienced. If your company success depended upon a diamond cutter, wouldn't you want only the best?

The primary difference in the advertising of products on the Web and in traditional printed media (such as newsprint and magazine ads) is that Web advertising is a much more interactive, almost a real-time one-on-one, communication with the consumer. Likewise, it is far more interactive than television, but with the ability to halt the action, ask questions, collect answers, and print results. Information on demand, real-time chats, and the consumer's ability to reasonably determine if the product fulfills their needs satisfies the impulse-buyer urges far better than retail computer stores. In the case of software products, consumers can download trial copies, interact with the product, and determine if they want to purchase the product without having to take a journey or pay hard cash.

The power of Web marketing has also allowed the company to fine-tune their campaigns to target narrower consumer markets. While having a Web Home Page allows anybody to visit you, utilising specialised Web programs can allow your ad to reach consumers that better match your ideal consumer profile than printed media ads.

All things considered, any company should want to have a Web page, and to aggressively use Web marketing programmes to reach their target audience.

But Beware....

A while ago, major companies started allowing their resellers to become trained and to offer education on the vendor products to their clients. There was a rush to become trained, and to open education centres in true goldrush style. But the vendor recognized that by allowing infinite expansion of education centres, that the competitive nature would cause price competition, decrease the quality of the education, and that it would eventually fail as the education centres abandoned the vendor. As a result, the vendor placed a limit on the authorized education centres and restricted growth to assure that their resellers remained profitable and satisfied. That vendor was Novell.

Today the Internet is infinitely large. A million stores can open overnight selling the same products, and the vast quantity of competition can make sure that nobody makes money. In fact, I predict that there will be a general backlash against uncontrolled internet growth as site owners discover that they spent much more money to be on the Web than Web business returned. As the smaller businesses abandon their Web programs for localised and targeted traditional print media businesses, the Web will be left to the giants, and those few that have the ability to pace themselves in this race. Once the cost of entry is raised to the point that small business cannot compete globally and make money, a new internet program that is regionally targeted, much like local TV stations and radio, will surface. I believe that Intranet-like SubWebs for the regional consumers will become dominant, and those Web owners that have not overexerted themselves in the race for Web fame will see a new day, and will surface as the true Web winners. Thus the objective is to offer competent Web presence, differentiate your products, pace your spending so that you will not be a casualty littering the Webscape (some will be winners, but not most), and to assume that you will not strike it rich on the internet within the next year or two. Of course, prosperity does raise its head every once in a while, and maybe it will be you. That is what business judgment is all about.

The Web is a special place, deceptively simple and overwhelmingly complex. A novice can easily enter the web, fumble about, and be quickly engulfed. They think they understand it, but they may be wrong about everything. And if they were right a month ago, they might be wrong today. The Web is like The Blind Men and the Elephant children's poem, teaching us all that your limited view of the world should not be counted on as accurate when describing the whole. The marketing techniques that work on the web are not as expected, they shift and change in seemingly unpredictable ways, and although they are often perceived as black magic and insoluble, they are really great opportunities for the wise.

It is impossible to predict the success of any web programme. There are too many moving parts in an infinitely complex global machine. But, with prudence and wisdom, and a creative adaptation of trends and intuition, a Web marketing program can be created that works.

For instance, I have recently conceived and implemented a software product launch that focused entirely on an Internet ShareWare strategy. In eight weeks, a comprehensive and very successful Web advertising campaign utilising banners to establish image and attract prospects to the company Web page was designed and implemented. The components needed were Web page redesign, product revisions to support a ShareWare registration and enhance demo penetration, banner advertising design, ad contract negotiation (utilising agent leverage to minimise costs), ad placement, and exposure for the new product through partnerships, press releases, registration contests, and reviews and rankings. This program placed the product on the TOP 25 - ALL CATEGORIES most downloaded products list on the high-volume CNET DOWNLOAD.COM site for two weeks in January, 1997. The click-thru rate for the designed banner was the highest of all CNET banners in January, inclusive of the largest of the industry leaders, with some daily click-thru rates of 5.2%. Web-based product registration exceeded 7% of all downloads within that 4 week period.

These are standard tasks, but what does it mean? What is a good click-thru rate? Am I advertising at the right site? Am I paying too much? What is a hit, and do I care? How can I increase traffic to our site, and obtain sales? What is "push", and is it for me? What is our ROI, how do I improve it, and how can I more than survive in this changing medium?