Interactive Marketing
Something Old, Something New…
By Edward "Skip" Masland, Director of Marketing & Internet Strategy,
WebSolvers, Inc.
The Premise
You have a great idea, an innovative organization or an incredible product, and you're ready to share it with the world. You've pinpointed your USP (Unique Selling Point), and you've either planned or built a first-class Website to effectively communicate that point to your target audience. Moreover, you've identified your target audience right down to the ideal customer, giving him or her a name, a face, an age and a lifestyle.
Now the million-dollar question is: How are you going to get that customer to visit your Website? Let's imagine you're working with a limited budget. The Website wasn't cheap (otherwise it would look that way), but you still have about $50,000 in your budget for advertising and promotions. Not a lot. Certainly not enough to spend on mass-market TV or newspaper advertising. However, with the right combination of on-line and traditional, off-line marketing, you can still make your site a success.
The Process
Traditional, off-line marketing is familiar and essential. It includes everything from your business cards and stationery to brochures, ads and direct mail.
On-line marketing is still evolving…but just as essential to the success of your Website. The most pervasive on-line form is the banner ad, which is actually a hold-over from traditional, print advertising (though with rich media/flash animation, banner ads are finally starting to come in to their own). As part of an overall multi-media marketing campaign, banner ads can be quite effective. But they are certainly not the be-all or end-all of on-line marketing.
With the technological evolution comes constant innovation, and there are a couple of new and innovative techniques that are quickly becoming staples of an effective on-line marketing effort.
Viral Marketing is one to consider. Basically, it's an on-line version of traditional "word-of-mouth" marketing. You find ways to spread your message throughout your targeted group by offering something of value, usually for free.
The most oft-recounted and successful tale of viral marketing is Hotmail.com, the world's largest free e-mail service. Hotmail grew a subscriber base more rapidly than any company in the history of the world...faster than any new on-line, Internet or print publication ever. In its first year and a half, Hotmail signed up over 12 million subscribers, each of whom willingly completed a detailed demographic and psychographic profile, including occupation and salary.
How did Hotmail do it? By attaching an unobtrusive viral message to the bottom of its subscribers' outbound e-mails: P.S. Get your free e-mail at Hotmail.com? By creating an "underground buzz" that made people feel as if they'd found something special and secret? By making it easy for new users to subscribe to the service immediately? Actually, the answer is all of the above.
As a result, from company launch to 12 million users, Hotmail spent less than $500K on marketing, advertising and promotions. Another, more current example of viral marketing is Napster, a site that's become all the rage on college campuses. Napster is a system of interlinked servers and client software designed to let people freely "share" their MP3 music collections with others across the Internet. It's easy to join and easy to use. Plus, with its built-in chat capabilities, Napster has quickly become a powerful community of fervent users without making a big investment in advertising or marketing. People come for the content. And the word is spread from one user to another.
Affiliate Marketing is another on-line model that can have tremendous rewards. In a nutshell, you identify other Websites that appeal to your targeted audience and forge alliances that encourage those Websites to promote your product by offering them a percentage of the sale.
These days, a company that wants to launch its own affiliate program can utilize shareware scripts, commercial software packages or completely customized, turnkey solutions. There's literally something for every budget. One of the first and most-well-known examples of affiliate marketing is Amazon.com. Jeff Bezos, Amazon's CEO and founder, was at a party, talking with a woman who wanted to sell books about divorce on her web site. Bezos was intrigued by the idea and suggested that the woman link her site to Amazon.com in exchange for a commission on the book sales. That was the beginning of Amazon's Associates Program. The idea is incredibly simple: When visitors click from the affiliate site through to Amazon.com and purchase items, the affiliate receives a commission.
Affiliate marketing has flourished over the past three-and-a-half years, and the original prototype has led to a variety of new and innovative models. As proof of its reach and flexibility, Amazon's original model has been creatively revised and refined to work all across the board - for businesses, individuals, schools and charitable organizations.
So, for relatively no up-front investment, you convince the organizations behind some well-researched sites to join your affiliate program. Almost immediately, those sites start displaying your banners, buttons and bursts - promoting your products on their sites for all their visitors to see. When all goes well, affiliate sites provide positive positioning, promoting products and services that are relevant to their content and their customers.
E-mail Marketing is on-line direct mail. Spam. Junk. Trash. UNLESS, of course, you've built your own "opt-in" mailing list made up of people who have actually requested that you contact them. This is Permission Marketing, where you have honestly asked for and received the customer's permission to send him/her specific, customer-defined information. Far less expensive than regular direct mail - no paper, no ink, and no post office - permission-based, e-mail marketing makes you a welcomed guest in the customer's home. Setting up an opt-in e-mail program can be as simple as asking the customer if s/he would like more information, or as complex as offering customers a choice of what kind of information they want to receive.
The bottom line is: Whether you're working with a traditional advertising agency or a specialized Web firm - or both - the key to making your site a success is to implement the right combination of on-line and off-line marketing to drive your target to your Website to buy your product.
The Promise
A sophisticated Internet firm can help you discover which sites are compatible with your product and targeted to your audience. It can help you determine the viability and timing of a strong multi-media marketing campaign. It can help you plan and implement a variety of on-line marketing strategies.
Most importantly, it can work with you to help craft an off-line message that will effectively drive traffic on-line, to your site. Remember: Any new advertisements, brochures and direct mail pieces you produce should not only feature your Website address but give people a darn good reason to visit it as well.
By integrating the old and the new in a strategically sound and targeted way, you can make the most of any budget and make your Website a site to be seen.
WebSolvers, Inc., located in Winter Park, Florida, is a proven leader in creative Web site development, Internet hosting, marketing and e-commerce. The company is dedicated to serving customers in a new age of Internet services and challenges its clients to integrate the Internet into their daily business activities. The firm's home on the Web is www.websolvers.com.
