There has been a lot of hype about online marketing but the truth is that for any business it offers real benefits – and for start up businesses it can give you real brand presence for a fraction of the marketing spend that traditional media would cost. Online marketing allows you to play God and gives you the opportunity to build your brand and play to your key strengths. Online marketing can bring in a whole new set of customers or woo past customers and make them fall in love with your brand offer all over again. The possibilities are limitless and you can access an incredible amount of people at a fraction of the cost of traditional media advertising.
Calculate how much it would cost for you to advertise daily in all the national newspapers, TV and radio stations and the audience you would reach. The cost would be prohibitive for even the biggest furniture retailers. Yet you can access a similar audience day in and day out for the next few years just by getting the online basics right with a minimal investment. The key to a successful online presence is ignoring what other people are doing and concentrating on what is right for you. While the big brands may be dazzling with cultist viral marketing campaigns and online glitter, most businesses can start by getting the basics right and see a return on their initial investment.
The first step with any online presence is the website. Obviously the design is important and should reflect key aspects of your brand. Invest in good design and good structure. The website should last at least three years so bear this in mind when you are costing it out. Your site needs to be quick, user friendly, accessible and interesting.
When you are setting a budget for a new website or a redesign ensure there is a good chunk of money set aside for search engine optimisation. The vast majority of your traffic will come from search engines. If you don’t have either good organic or paid for search ratings or as happens more usually a mixture of both, then your investment in your website is redundant. Check out google for more information on paid for search engine optimisation.
The key measures for effective website performance should be whether the site is attracting the right visitors and secondly whether you are managing you to convert these. A good web statistics package should be able to deliver the right information, ensuring you can monitor your marketing activity and return on investment as well as giving you valuable insights into your customer behaviour which can be fed back into other areas of the business such as buying. If you can follow the behaviour of early exit sessions based on search keywords and in-site search you’ll know the intent of the visitors as well as weaknesses in your offer.
Search engine optimisation should be considered before the site is even built, as it will depend on features you build into your site. If you already have a site that isn’t performing well on the optimisation side you would be well advised to revisit this aspect.
By building in the right features to your website you will achieve better organic listings, an increasingly important feature of the online market at the moment and one which is going to save you significant amounts on marketing your website and paying for online search optimisation.
However, achieving good search engine status by natural search results can be a long term project so most companies would be advised to mix both methods for optimum results. Talk to the company who is doing your website and they should be able to advise you what type of optimisation suits your business.
(c) Start Your Dream
In the current economic doom-and-gloom climate (unscrupulously fuelled by mass hysteria in the media), I was delighted to stumble across this article about an unlikely task for a virtual assistant ... only unlikely as in "hadn't thought of it before".So whatever your business, why not consider hiring your own Virtual Assistant - the possibilities are endless!
Booking your flight online just got a whole lot more fun in the shape of Jenn, the new ‘virtual assistant’ at Alaska Airlines.
Perhaps a taste of things to come from airlines in the UK, Jenn has her own voice and personality and is there to help customers of Alaska Airlines and Horizon Air book their flights and to deal with all those frequently asked questions.
Jenn responds verbally when customers type questions in her chat window, asks follow-up questions when needed, provides a written response and related web links, and displays the site’s most relevant page. And to prove she’s a virtual gal with a personality, Jenn will also answer personal questions on topics like pets and favourite foods.
"With nearly half of our tickets purchased at alaskaair.com, our web site has become the single most popular way customers interact with us before traveling," explains Alaska's managing director of customer experience, Ann Ardizzone. "Jenn offers customers a more personalised, engaging experience online, while quickly connecting them with the site's most relevant information."
Next IT provided the software to produce Jenn. “Alaska and Horizon had the vision to see how this technology could improve service to their customers online, and now they are raising the bar for the travel industry,” comments Next IT’s president and chief executive officer, Fred Brown.
Jenn is the first virtual assistant introduced by an airline in the USA. Alaska Airlines and Horizon Air can claim some other notable industry firsts. They were the first North American airlines to sell tickets online in 1995, and the first airlines in the world to offer airport check in online in 1999.
Together Alaska Airlines and Horizon Air offer flights to 92 cities in North America through their network in Alaska, Hawaii, the rest of the US, Canada and Mexico.
Written by: Nick Purdom
