Web site marketing strategies for your small business.

Web site marketing strategies always begin with the customer. Know what they want, know how find them, know what to sell them.

Not unlike the brick and mortar world, website marketing strategies and planning rely on knowing your customer. However, the internet offers ways of doing marketing research that is difficult and sometimes expensive to perform offline.

Let's say you have a fabric shop in a small town. You know there are lots of crafters and quilters, so you figure you'll be well supported. It will be easy to get the word out about your new store, since the town is so small. You've raised kids here, you've worked in the area your whole life. You feel you know the market.

But do you?

How do you know exactly what they're looking for?

Is the market really big enough to support your store and all the inventory, overhead and other related expenses?

What's your long-term plan? How will you grow if you want to expand in the future, or even sooner?

You can answer some of these questions with marketing research of your local area. You could mail out (at $.39 per first class mailing) a customer service survey. Ask lots of questions about what local crafters and quilters want. Find out if they need more fabric choices, or if they'd prefer more classes, or (if you can afford it) both?

But who do you mail to?

If you've been keeping track of your customers (mostly your neighbors, right?) you have a list. But if you're looking to expand, you want to talk with more people than your existing customer base – you want new customers. You want to know their needs.

Next, you find a mailing list broker who can sell you a list (at $.03 per name) of people who are crafters and quilters. Fantastic! You can do a test mailing of 5000 people, find out what they want and develop your expansion plan to sell to them.

But when you get the list you realize that of those 5000 people, only about 50 of them live within a one-hour's drive of your shop. The rest of them live at least 75 miles away.

And how do you know they'll read your survey and respond? Professional direct marketing experts get really excited with a 5% return on a survey. How can you reach these people if only 250 people actually respond to the survey (and none of them live nearby!)

So you decide to build a web site to sell to people at a distance. Even if you bring them to your shop once or twice a year, you'll certainly increase your sales.

A quick (and undoubtedly optimistic) look at the numbers shows you an 8% increase in profits if you can sell to some of these 5000 people once a year by reaching them on the internet rather than in the mail.

After firing up your computer, you find way too many choices of web hosts but finally land on one you saw in a Super Bowl ad. If they can afford heavy advertising costs like that, you figure, they must be doing something right.

You buy their starter package for $14.95 and feel like you're getting away with something. After all, this web site is a whole lot cheaper than that mailing you were considering!

After about a month (or longer if you have to learn how to put up the page yourself) you have a one-page online catalog of your fabrics and wares. Your site is live and waiting for the world to find you.

I'm sorry to be the one to tell you – you may be waiting for a very long time.

We've seen this scenario too many times. It's heartbreaking, in fact. Web site marketing strategies require so much more than a little code on a page. While it's nearly impossible to state with certainty how many web sites now exists on the 'net, as of January 2007, Google reports that they are indexing 4,285,199,774 web pages! And that's a conservative number because Google doesn't index every page on the 'net!

A billion is a huge number, and 4.3 billion is nearly unfathomable.

Ready for another option?

SiteSOHO.com offers web site marketing strategies for your small business.

• The little fabric store in the country.
• The small town mechanic.
• The copy editing service you run from your dining room table.
• The retail store (which these days is frequently flanked by vacant stores if you have one of those "prime" main street locations!)

Don't do that survey mailing. We're a full service internet marketing consultant service. We offer web site marketing strategies for your small business.

We'll put together an affordable, customized web site marketing strategies / marketing research package based on your business needs.

SiteSOHO.com web site marketing services are fully menu driven (you choose the level of service that suits your needs):

• We can tell you what your customers are looking for and help you give it to them.
• We can create a dynamic web site that Google will index and your customers will find.
• We'll even show you how (and suggest what) to sell well outside your geographic area, even around the world!

We've got the wheel – don't reinvent it. Let us customize it for you.

Oh – and we can't promise you that 8% growth in our example above, but let's shoot for 48% instead. Will that work for you?

Contact us to learn more.

Return from Web Site Marketing Strategies to home page.