Establishing your business presence on the web is very important for survival of any business, below I will set stage how marketing was done in the past and how it has changed due to the introduction of the web.
Conventional Marketing
Conventional businesses market products/services using following methods:
- Paper Flyers
- Billboards
- Advertises in Newspapers
- Seminars/Trade shows/Expos
- Cold calling potential customers on their phones using leads purchased from marketing firm or plain old phone book
- Door to door sales
For a large, well-funded business all of the above are possible, not really true for small scale business which lacks manpower and funding. Small businesses usually survived via word of mouth and community type marketing.
New age Marketing
Marketing in the 21st Century still relies on the above components; enter the World Wide Web (WWW). All of above still apply with more energy directed to marketing on the web. This is where as a new business you would need to establish web presence (provided you already have a product and goals set), which includes some of the following:
- Identify if you will have a website built from ground up or will use existing CMS (Content Management System). Having a website built from ground up is very time, resource, and cost intensive. Whereas using current CMS products the time, resource, and cost factors can be drastically reduced. Some of the CMS available are:
- WordPress
- Moveable Type
- Drupal
- Joomla
- Electronic Commerce specific products are:
- Zencart
- OScommerce
- Magneto
- Register a domain (get a xyz.com name for your business) and also a hosting package (this is where your website will be built and when ready be accessible by users on the internet)
- Get Logos, look and feel of your website done. In case of CMS you can purchase themes, whereby reducing a lot of work from design perspective.
- Will you allow users to register on your website or will use social media for that purpose
- Hire a SEO (Search Engine Optimization) expert to advise you on submitting your website to the search engines, how should you write the articles on your website, words that describe your website. Get analytical reports on who is visiting you websites using tools such as Google Analytics, etc.
- In order to promote your website in addition to it being indexed by the search engines you will have to engage in social networks to promote it and get leads, some of the social media sites are:
- Google+
- StumbleUpon
- Digg
- To accelerate the advertising to get the leads you can promote your business using:
- Facebook Ads
- Google Adwords
- etc..
- Once all the above has been done, you will need tools to manage your submissions and analyze engagement, some of the tools are:
- Twylah
- Tweetdeck
- Hootsuite
- Seesmic
- Buffer
- Klout
- Peerindex
- Kred.ly
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