Business marketing online involves a lot of different components. However, it can be condensed into a number of important aspects or components. Getting each of these aspects right is crucial to long term success.
1. Customer Acquisition
You just have to find ways to get new prospects. That is, you have to attract new visitors to your web site or business. Online, this is referred to as traffic generation. In other words, traffic refers to visitors who come to your site.
There are different types of traffic and there are different types of sources. However, let’s categorize traffic broadly into free and paid traffic. This categorization can be misleading, though. There is really nothing like free traffic as you must give something in exchange (money, time, skill, space, asset or a mix of them all).
“Free” here actually refers to traffic types where you take an action or actions once and get traffic residually. Such actions can be completed without spending a dime. However, time is usually spent. Examples of this include: guest blogging on high traffic sites, article marketing, video marketing, giving away reports, guest ezine articles and so on.
There are also paid traffic sources. This refers to those methods of getting visitors that depend on paying either for placement on assets owned by another party or pay visitor sent over to your site. Examples are PPC (like Adwords), solo ads, media buying, etc. The crucial point here is that once you stop paying, traffic from these sources stop. Whichever traffic sources you use, it is important that you employ them in such a way that they will eventually help you build residual traffic. This is where SEO for your business marketing online is very important. We shall get into more details in subsequent articles.
2. The Nurturing Process
What’s the point in getting all those visitors if you can’t get them to deliver your most wanted response? Therefore, it is important that you have a mechanism in place for pre-selling each of your visitors to a point where they happily buy from you. People buy from people they know. They buy from people they trust. We have been trained NOT to deal with strangers. Therefore, make sure you build a relationship with your visitors. Make sure you get them to trust you enough to make commitments. The more expensive your product or service (or the more you expect from them), the more you have to do to pre-sell them.
Take away: The more you want to get from your prospect, the more you have to invest in him/her and the longer you must be prepared to make that investment. The internet has NOT changed one typical human response: People don’t commit heavily to strangers! You can nurture your prospects via email marketing or a blog.
3. The Sales Process
It is very important that you ensure that your sales process is very efficient. Invest in your sales copy. It is the equivalent of the sales department in an offline business. Work hard on improving your conversion rate. If by spending an extra $1000 on it you can improve its conversion by just 1% for a product that has a profit margin of $50, you would be making an additional $5000 by the time your 10,000th visitor comes by.
4. Customer Support
Your marketing must make provision for times when your customers have issues or challenges with your product or service. You can turn the worst customer experience to a great marketing opportunity.
Let us assume a store sends out a defective product to a customer. Angry, this customer returns it. A good marketing plan could actually turn this angry customer into a raving fan. Imagine what would happen if this store replaces this defective product and adds a related product as a way to say “We are sorry”. Now imagine they include an extra one year to the warranty (all on the house). Do you still imagine that this customer would be that angry with them? This might actually turn to a reference point by which he/she now judges other stores. So a negative event has actually been used to good effect by a store that has a good marketing plan.
5. Customer Referrals
Ensuring that your business is set up to over-deliver to your customers is critical if you want to enjoy the power of word-of-mouth marketing. This can secure your business and almost render your advertising department redundant. What is the standard in your industry? Exceed it and then some. You don’t have to give away the farm to get your customers excited, though. Showing you really care can go a long way. Showing them that you are still interested in them after they have made the purchase is very important. The quality and quantity of customer referrals you get will depend on: How great your product/service is, how efficient your delivery is, how well you handle support issues and how much you show them that they are special.
