The great thing about the Internet is that it allows marketers of all sizes—large and small—to reach the right customer with the right message at the right time. And, because marketing products and services online doesn’t require paper or postage, the cost of running an Internet marketing campaign is usually much lower than it is to mail out a catalog or buy an ad in a magazine.
Here are three low-cost Web-based productivity tools that can help you find new customers and keep in touch with the ones you already have:
Constant Contact: Having spent seven years running an email marketing company, I'm pretty picky when it comes to email marketing solutions. That's why I recommend Constant Contact to everyone I know (and why I use it to publish The Friends of Axxess Newsletter). Not only does it provide easy-to-use templates and a simple way to store and upload your existing customer list, but it also handles bounces and opt-outs and makes sure that you as an email marketer fully comply with industry best practices and the latest government rules and regulations. Best of all, Constant Contact offers a 60-day free trial and an affordable pricing structure based on the number of people on your list. Check it out at www.constantcontact.com.
Survey Monkey: Want to know what your customers think you could be doing better? Just ask them! With Survey Monkey, a do-it-yourself survey program, you don't need to be a market researcher to design a survey to find out your customers' likes, dislikes and demographic profiles. Like Constant Contact, Survey Monkey offers helpful templates; it also gives you the ability to ask multiple-choice, yes-or-no and open-ended questions and updates the results automatically every time someone completes the poll. Once you're done designing your survey, Survey Monkey lets you create a URL to post on your Web site or pop into an email message. The cost is $19.95 a month though there's a free basic subscription that lets you create surveys with up to 10 questions and 100 responses per survey. Check it out at www.surveymonkey.com
Hitslink: Unlike Constant Contact and Survey Monkey, Hitslink is not a customer retention or market research tool. But I've found it to be an invaluable way to find out what prospective clients are looking for and how we can better target our message. With Hitslink, all you need to do is place a little HTML code on each of your Web pages and the program records each time a Web surfer clicks through to your site and generates a wealth of statistics accessible through easy-to-read charts and graphs. One of my favorite Hitslink reports is the one that tells you what search terms people are typing to find your site on Google, Yahoo and the other search engines. Thanks to Hitslink, we now have pages about "fashion business plans," "restaurant business plans," etc. that have boosted our page rankings in the search engines and brought lots of new clients in the door. Hitslink costs $19.95 a month and is worth every penny. There's also a 30-day free trial that tracks up to 20,000 hits. Check it out at www.hitslink.com.
—Rosalind Resnick, CEO and Founder of
Axxess Business Consulting.
The wide variety of options to advertise and market products and services online can be a daunting and complex task for small businesses. With so many choices and people trying to sell the latest and greatest marketing tool to reach new customers, small business owners may not know what will work best and give them the greatest return on their marketing investment. Many business owners have likely thrown away a few marketing dollars to try some pricey online tactics that really didn’t help them acquire customers, boost sales or grow their business as anticipated. My first advice for small to mid-size business customers is to make sure you connect whatever online advertising or marketing options you choose to specific business metrics or goals (i.e. increase new sales leads by 10 percent, increase ROI by five percent, add 500 new customers, etc.). By tying your online marketing or advertising campaigns to specific and measurable business goals, business owners can better determine the true effectiveness of their marketing investment, rather than paying money and then crossing their fingers.
In my view, one of the most effective ways to reach new customers online is through paid search advertising, also known as search engine marketing (SEM), on the major search engines like Google, MSN, Yahoo! and Ask.com. With SEM, a company bids on search keywords (anywhere from one or two to sometimes several hundred) that it thinks people will enter on the search engines to find products and services similar to what the company offers. If a specific keyword that the company has bid on for a particular search is entered, a paid ad is listed in ranked order for searchers to click on the link to the company’s Web site for more information or to make a purchase.
The early days of paid search campaigns were fairly simple for even the smallest businesses, when placement of your ad was dependent on the price you paid. But now, search engines like Google and MSN weigh different factors. What the marketer is willing to pay is only one of many factors that ultimately will determine the cost for position. These search engines use a dynamic ranking system that weighs both cost per click (CPC) and quality, making what a marketer actually will pay per click an unknown factor. These models tend to rank based on a quality scoring model. The theory is that this provides greater relevance when searching. In this opaque model, business owners need guidance from outside experts to help them manage the complexity of the quality scoring rankings and help businesses better manage campaigns. Smaller companies need a solution that is easy to use but based on solid technology that manages keywords as a single portfolio instead of individual keywords. This approach applies mathematical algorithms to model the expected return on all variations of keyword bids and automatically selects the optimal mix to create a reliable and consistent higher rate of return. As a result marketers are able to balance cost versus risk; execute their campaigns in context of budget spend and business objectives; and ensure maximum ROI.
Today, online marketing is about utilizing analytics and formulas to optimize campaigns, making it much more of a science than traditional, offline advertising. No matter what online marketing or advertising tactics that small business owners choose to implement amongst the crowded landscape of options, I advise them to take a hard look at how the tactic can be connected with their business performance goals and ensure that valuable dollars are being spent wisely.
And take a hard look at incorporating some level of SEM into the marketing mix. It will pay off.
—Ellen Siminoff, CEO,
Efficient Frontier.
Because so much marketing for small business has gone online, very few small businesses now take the time to produce printed materials, thinking that a web site is sufficient. But it's not. You still need to have printed materials -- a sales letter, a brochure or samples in hard copy -- so that when you are actively marketing and cold calling your target market, you have something to send them in the real mail that will land on their desk. Saying "go to my web site" doesn't usually cut it. They won't go, unless they have a pressing need at that moment. You have to do the work of getting something into their hands.
—Ilise Benun, Founder,
Marketing Mentor.
