Do You Need An Online Marketing Plan?
Friday, June 5th, 2009
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As an offline business owner, you know all too well, the necessity of advertising and marketing for success in business. Without them, you will not generate customers or clients.
Without customers or clients, you will not generate revenues.
Traditional forms of marketing have their place. However, with the economic climate we’re in today, many businesses are out of business because they simply cannot afford the costly yellow page or newspaper ads that only bring scarce, random results.
Even telemarketing and direct mail are costly options with no significant results to boast.
Now that we are well into the “Information Age”, and with the advent of the Internet, more advertising and marketing opportunities are available than ever before.
More and more, when consumers need a product or service, they go online and search on Google or some other search engine to find what they need or want.
In the Anchorage area for instance, 11,000 new people are going online everyday, looking for the products and services that are being sold.
All local business owners need to do is get in front of them.
Wouldn’t it make sense then, in addition to what you are already doing, to have a web presence that is easily found in the search engines? Not only would you draw more local business to you, but you would capitalize on a worldwide market, selling your products and services from your website to anyone in the world.
Surprisingly, very few business owners are tapping in to the vast reservoir of effective, inexpensive marketing opportunities the Internet provides.
Nowadays, if you have a business but no website, you are way behind your competitors.
More importantly, if you have a business and a website, but your website is not working for you properly, you are worse than behind your competitors, you are losing money.
It is better to be in business with no website, than to have a website that is ineffective because it becomes an income drain, not the profitable marketing tool it should be. Your website should, not just pay for itself, but generate revenues that you otherwise would not have received.
However, your website does not accomplish this by itself. Just putting up a website is not enough. You need an online marketing plan that gets you in front of thousands of potential customers.
So what does it take to develop a web presence that is both effective and profitable?
