Whether we’re business owners, employees, volunteers or just family members trying to carry our load, we’re all looking to do more with less. Get more done in less time, earn more money with less effort, get more benefits with less money…we’re looking for the top ten if not the one thing that will just get ‘er done so we move on to other things.

For businesses trying to establish an effective marketing plan the silver bullet has been perhaps more illusive than any other area of focus. We budget a percentage of our revenues, guess at a particular mix of appropriate media, and hope for the best. We don’t know if we are going to get the results we desire until we get any results at all. With print, publish and distribution of printed media cycles, those results typically don’t come back for days, weeks or even months at which point we evaluate the results and make changes as appropriate and go through another round. Throwing out lots of money to gain as wide exposure as possible in hopes that some small percentage will become customers, and trying to believe that over the long term good is being done. Something about this process just doesn’t jive with the way we run every other part of our businesses.

For this very reason, internet marketing has become more and more important to a successful business marketing strategy. It’s not that the internet is necessarily where your particular customers are to the exclusion of traditional media, as some would have you believe, (although several studies have shown that more people use the internet to shop for local purchases now than the phone book). It’s not that someone who stumbles on your website is definitely going to buy something from you, although a study as far back as 2003 by the Yellow Pages Association reported this about their online Yellow Pages listings:

·67 percent made a contact (73 percent of those contacts were by phone) after visiting
·64 percent made or intended to make a purchase (40 percent actually make a purchase)
·65 percent of purchasers were new customers.

Maybe by mixing a little of the new with the tried and true, you can significantly improve your marketing effectiveness…

It’s no secret that nearly 2/3 of internet users are now connecting via high speed connections. They are using their now “always on" service for everything from a phonebook to an encyclopedia, from validating their view of the world to staging debate, and from product research to comparative pricing. Finding our niche as a business on the web is increasingly as daunting as the need to be there is nagging. Where is a business to start?

Start with the familiar; your own experience: your successes, and yes, your disappointments. List your customers, and list your products. Sort them in order of profitability. Who are your best customers in terms of profits? Which products provide the best revenue? Look for patterns. Size, price, frequency, industry, geography are a few of the logical ones, but even things like seasonality, what day of the month, of the week or even time of day transactions are completed, can all be valuable information in determining some direction and priority. This sort of exercise can be done with nothing more than pencil and paper; piece of cake. You know it like the back of your hand.

Now use the internet to work some magic for you. You have a time machine at your disposal that can speed up the entire process to lightning-like efficiency.

Take your findings from above and do some testing. Online advertising is so inexpensive you can use it to test ideas. You can get results in hours (even minutes) and use these results to develop your strategies. Expose your most profitable products and services to those that, by your experience, are most likely to benefit from them. Monitor the results and make adjustments. If you’re not set up to actually sell products online, gather information, offer white paper, coupons, educational material; establish a connection, create a dialog. Even if you have no intentions of ever (you know that they say about never) selling your products/services online, you can gain the advantage of having more of the single most significant business resources at your disposal. Customers.

Whether you consider the entire planet as your market or you serve only a 3 block radius, you can be sure your customers are online. If you don’t have an effective internet strategy and even just one of your competitors does, you have lost an important touch-point and the opportunity to become, or remain, the provider of choice.

Silver Bullet? You decide. Important for your success? No contest.