Is Your Business Web Promotable? The Answers May Be Here!

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Is Your Business Web Promotable?

INTRODUCTION

What you are reading is privileged information. Many clients of my consulting firm have paid thousands of dollars for this information. I feel the time has come to make it available to the general public.

Every year thousands of businesses and entrepreneurs set up shop on the Web, and most of them disappear with little to show for their investment. Many more are only marginally successful. Failure in the Web Marketplace is generally due to one of the following three reasons:

1) Misjudged the Internet market

2) Lack of advertising, or a poor advertising strategy

3) Failure to maximize visibility relative to the competition

If you are expanding your business to include an internet customer base or starting a new internet business, you need to know how to avoid becoming digital roadkill on the Information Superhighway.

The first step in any business should be MARKET TESTING! This article describes some principles of advertising on the web that will help you test your market, and outlines a strategy for trying out your product.

KNOW YOUR CUSTOMERS

Customers on the Web have low attention spans. They often have some idea of what they are looking for when they log on, but they are easily distracted. This is because they know that the whole world waits at their fingertips. They also tend to be young, middle class, have white collar jobs, and have reasonable amounts of discretionary cash. A notable departure from this includes the large numbers of students, especially from colleges and universities, who take advantage of educational Internet access.

Is your product likely to be something your customers will go out of their way to find? Poor products to promote include low cost or everyday items one might find at the store. Also, obscure gadgets are unlikely to attract many people. More promotable kinds of products include expensive items, since people are more likely to seek out bargains on investment caliber purchases. One way to decide if your product is likely to be successful is to scope out your competition. If no one else is promoting similar products on the Web and you don't know why, then maybe you shouldn't either.

Something else to think about if you aren't selling a product is why do you want to be on the Web. If you own a restaurant,for example, then perhaps you would be better off advertising in travel brochures and newspapers. Few people look for restaurants on the Web because other advertising mediums already work so well. The Web is a global advertising forum. People in Australia don't search the web for diners in Braddock, PA.

Regionality is a real issue with the web. Many malls and search engines try to create regional directories and listings, but the most effective businesses by far are those that can handle a national clientele. Direct mail businesses are exceptionally easy to make into web businesses.

ADVERTISING FOR THE DIGITAL AGE

A little knowledge of the Web can go a long way toward refining your advertising technique. First of all, web surfers hate waiting. After all, there's so much to see. Web pages that have too many large graphics, especially animated ones, will often send surfers to less busy waters. Adopt an attractive but lean Web presence. Potential customers will also move on if they are confused about who you are or what you are selling. Avoid being too coy or clever. Straightforward is usually the best policy. Make sure your web site has a strong, convenient, easy to understand structure so that your customers won't become lost, since being lost tends to cause people to look for more familiar territory elsewhere.

DON'T FORGET the primary principles of normal advertising! People don't watch TV just to see the commercials! This is even more true on the web. Often, people are shopping for a specific product, looking for free information, or seeking entertainment on the web. You test advertising needs to be well written, interesting, and useful! You can create content which attracts your potential customers to your web site. If you are selling information, you can demo a small portion of your info (for free) as a promotion. If you are selling products, you should give detailed information about your products, or even create reviews of your product vs. several competing ones. You can drastically reduce the per lead/hit cost of your advertising by creating content that attracts your customers.

BE EVERYWHERE

Your competitors know how web surfers find things. Do you? The number one starting point for Web browsing is a search engine (or web directory). There are eight major search engines on the Web, and all have their own criteria for judging how to organize their lists. Knowing the ins and outs of search engines is important for being listed at the top of their search lists. Knowing that you need to submit your site to them is a good first step though. Also, find other sites whose products or topics are complementary to your product and e-mail their webmasters or site maintainers about having them put links to your site on theirs. Some especially popular sites sell banner space to others. Most of the search engines do, for example.

At least fifty companies on the internet claim to sell the secret to "getting your site to the top of the category" on search engines. The authors of this article have purchased many of the books on how to do this, and a lot of them are quite good. Picking up one of these texts is a great start to understanding search engines. We recommend one that comes with a subscription to periodic updates.

Another way to go is with a multi-submission service. My personal favorite is ROBO-SUBMIT. (http://www.inetwebs.com/ROBO/) They will let you test out their engine for free, and a cheap monthly subscription lets you submit to over 200 places as many times as you want. This really beats the typical cost of up to $200 for a single submission to 200 engines from many places.

A SIMPLE PLAN FOR MARKET TESTING

We have replicated this simple plan many times to test the market for various products on the internet. Here's how it works:

1. Create a simple web site that explains your product. Don't list your price, but DO include your PO Box, Phone Number, and E-mail address.

On your web site, you MUST HAVE A FORM FOR TAKING NAMES, ADDRESSES, and E-MAIL ADDRESSES. For an example of a site like this, check out:

http://www.uni-sol.com/window/html/morinda.html

The requests should go right into your mailbox. Later, you will get an auto-responder to take care it for you.

You also need a hit counter, so you can gauge how may people visited to your site.

2. Create a CONVERSION LETTER (if you are in direct marketing, you probably already have one) that sells your product to interested customers. It MUST include ordering instructions, the price, etc. (There are many excellent resources available on how to create this sort of letter.)

3. Advertise your site by buying advertising space. Two quick and relatively inexpensive ways to do this are to use a Businesslink mailing (www.businesslink.net) or an Infoseek targeted banner (www.infoseek.com). I won't say that these are really cheap, but they ARE very fast and easy to use. You will get some immediate feedback on how interested people are in your product.

4. E-mail and/or snail-mail your conversion letter to everyone who asks for more info about your product!

* After running your advertising, check out these ratios:

- Dollars of advertising per hit to your site

If your hits cost less than $0.50, you have an incredible product!

I your hits cost more than $10.00, you have either a poor product or a very poor advertisement!

- Hits to your site per request for info

The best results here are around 2 hits per request.

You may have as many as 10 hits per request and still have a good product.

- Sales per request for info

Many marketers are happy if they sell product to even 1% of the customers who request info. However, many clients of ours have had as many as 1 sale per 5 requests. If you get ratios like that, you have really marketable product!

NOTE: If you don't take credit cards and you don't have online or 1-800 ordering, you should expect 80% less response to your conversion letter! It's okay to test market without taking cards, having 1-800 or online ordering, etc., but it won't give you an accurate idea of how many prospects will BUY your product.

The Web is a very powerful marketplace, but it is not universally useful. Knowledge is very important to avoiding frustration and wasted money. Now you have the tools to decide if the Web is for you. Remember that this is only the first step. Once you have proven that you can sell your product on the internet market, you need to create an automated system for doing it.

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