Web Marketing

Effectively marketing your products, services and/or ideas over the web is critical to your success and yet it is one of the most neglected and least understood areas of the web. Over the past seven (7) years, we have learned many of the nuances of effective web marketing. A few basic principles worth mentioning are as follows:

• There are no hard and fast rules

• Your web marketing should be integrated into any other marketing, advertising and/or customer service campaigns that you may be running.

• Web site design, function and content are critical to getting people to your site as well as keeping them coming back.

• Effective search engine positioning is dependent upon a variety of factors, including url (i.e. www.yourname.com ) choice, integration of meta tag keywords and site content, number of pages linking to your site and advertising dollars spent.

• Proper use of targeted bulk email, listservers, autoresponders, web forms and the like can be an incredibly cost effective way of attracting new and better serving old customers.

• It is very important to track and/or measure the impact of your different web marketing strategies in order to refine them to get the most bang for your buck.

• Poor customer relations management (i.e. a failure to respond promptly to web inquiries or inability to effectively integrate information received via web interaction into your overall customer service database) can quickly destroy any benefits that your web marketing effort might bring.

These represent only a few of the many considerations that an effective web marketing program will take into account. Other marketing options include banner ad and link exchanges, electronic distribution of press releases to web databases and print publications, and proper use of testimonial pages. Similarly, many non-marketing specific considerations, such as - the amount of Internet bandwidth that may be required to accommodate the anticipated traffic; potential security problems, site maintenance costs and liabilities; and the ability to deliver your product and/or service to the increased demand created by your web marketing efforts - will need to be taken into account. Our many years of business experience, prior to the advent of the web, give us a leg up on most of our more youthful competitors in addressing such concerns because we understand how business works and what customers want and therefore are able to help our clients successfully cross the bridge between the "old" and "new" economy.