How to Leverage the Internet for Marketing Success

Years ago, most companies depended on growing a sales and marketing department from the ground up to create opportunities for product promotion. Feet on the street, print advertising, trade shows, conferences, speaking engagements, direct mail and word of mouth were many of the vehicles used to convey key messages to prospects and retain existing customers. With the Internet, it's a whole new world now.

For young, emerging businesses with a limited budget, the Internet provides excellent opportunities for promoting a product or service line.  In a relatively short time, the Internet has exploded with promotional opportunities.  For many companies, especially those that do all their business online, the benefits of the Internet significantly outweigh the benefits of all previously employed sales and marketing tools.

At 48HourPrint.com, for example, our online print business has grown from start-up status with no revenue in July 2003, to annual sales of over $20 million in five years.  During the past few years, the company has also been ranked as one of the top 400 printers in the United States, with industry surveys placing us in the upper 10 percent of the most profitable printers. 

How did we accomplish this?  The Internet and technology are the backbone of our growth strategy and have given us the tools to take a staid industry, commercial business-to-business printing, from the era of Ben Franklin to the twenty first century.  Our path to success has not been without costs, but by planning and investing strategically, as outlined below, we have been able to economically leverage our marketing dollars.

Know Your Customers

The first step in this process is determining your customers' profiles, buying habits, items or services they want, how they want them and what they don't want.  Many companies start this process inside their company and work toward the customer, assuming they know what their customers want and how they make purchases.  In reality, only your customers know these things, which need to be learned directly from them.  It is never too late to employ the services of a professional survey firm to reach out to your customers and prospects to gather intelligence on how to market to your audience via the Internet.  Following this course of action will allow you to take a deep and very focused approach to your messaging.    

Employ Operational and Strategic Planning

If you are not employing a twelve-month operational plan and a two- to three-year strategic plan, you need to start now.  The marketing sections of both plans are extremely critical to successful selling over the Internet.  Based on what you learned from your customer survey, which should be conducted regularly, you will learn which products and services are in demand.  Your own research and development efforts will also lead to new product and service ideas, which should be tested in the marketplace before general release.  Then, with the intelligence that you have gathered, develop a clear strategy for sales, marketing and, particularly, media planning.  Your operation and strategic plans for all aspects of your business should be updated quarterly.

Develop a Media Plan

PPC, SEO, BR and KW are just some of the acronyms tossed about in Internet marketing.  Few of us are experts in this field or have the time or inclination to become experts.  If you elect to learn on your own, while you are getting up to speed, your competition may be passing you by because they have elected to hire or retain experts in Internet marketing, which is a science in itself.  Even if you are a young company on a tight budget, you need to retain experts in web design, email and print messaging, keyword selection (KW), web site content creation (another science), search engine optimization (SEO) and pay per click (PPC) optimization and reporting.

Many Internet-based companies do not succeed strictly on the use of the Internet for creating attention and awareness of their products and services, as well as their company.  At 48HourPrint.com, our Internet marketing and sales efforts-which are primarily SEO, paid-clicks and email messaging-are supplemented by print advertising, direct mail, customer service specialists for major customers, trade shows, speaking engagements and referrals. 

Although some Internet-based companies have initially grown at what seems like the speed of the fastest of wireless connections, based strictly on an Internet strategy, sooner or later they employ other means of advertising.  Even online companies such as Monster and Orbitz use print, television, radio and other means of messaging to drive people to their web sites.  It's all about creating a solid plan to drive traffic to your site.    

Keep Current with Technology

For Internet-based companies, the investment in technology is the 800-pound gorilla in the back room that gets little attention until it is neglected.  If you don't feed it, it will come back to bite you.  As we all know from our experience with personal computers, phone systems, handheld messaging devices, and so on, technology is improving every day.  Stay on top of the latest developments, or have someone do this for you, so you don't get left behind.

Having a robust web site, your face to the world, is critical.  The front end, what your customers see, needs to be easy to navigate, fast and reliable.  The back end, what drives your business process, needs to be orderly and smooth, with sufficient capacity to handle the peaks of your business cycle. 

Great web site developers are in demand.  Your best bet, again working with a limited budget, is to outsource your technology development and maintenance to a firm that matches your needs.  You don't need a team of developers for a Google-type web site.  You need a solid partner to take care of the strategic and long-term development of your site.  Having someone on board internally who can handle day-to-day issues is a good idea as well.

Measure Your Success

Last but not least, how do you measure success?  Valid measurements include the number of unique visitors who visit your site, number of pages viewed, minutes spent per view, conversion rate, return on investment for paid clicks, new customer hits, and repeat customer hits.  This information is important, but in the end, it's about return on investment.  Be sure to measure how much revenue is coming through your web site relative to your sales and marketing dollars expended.  This will give you a true measure of your Internet marketing success.

Ask The Expert A Question

Raymond Pinard is the President & CEO of 48HourPrint.com, the leading business-to-business online printing company in the nation.  Mr. Pinard's impressive career encompasses both the manufacturing and service industry and includes years of corporate consulting. The former chief operating officer of St. Mary's Bank also is well known for his contributions to numerous civic and educational organizations

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