How an Internet Presence Is Like Traditional
Marketing
A Means to an End
Before you decide on an Internet presence, identify what your clients need from you in that medium so that you can determine how you can use your resources to meet these needs. Similarly, analyze the Internet presence of your competitors in order to compete
more effectively in the marketplace. Each of these procedures is something that you undertake to achieve specific goals. In other words, each is a means to an end: You should not undertake either activity for its own sake.
As you are no doubt aware, the Internet is a conglomeration of thousands of computer networks utilizing a common set of technical standards to create a worldwide communications medium. It has a population of approximately 70 million users and a presence in more than seventy countries, with a growth rate estimated to be 10 per cent per month.
Initially popularized by the academic and research communities, the Internet is quickly becoming an important tool for business. In fact, it is the most popular new medium for business, with applications ranging from advertising to recruitment. Whether they are Internet junkies or technically illiterate, many people believe that it is important for businesses to have an Internet presence.
From a marketing perspective, an Internet presence is like traditional marketing. It is an activity that is undertaken to achieve specific goals. As such, it requires effective management and must be integrated with other marketing activities. It allows you to provide information about your business and, of course, facilitates networking.
It does, however, have significant differences from traditional marketing approaches. An Internet presence allows you to communicate globally. Being interactive, it allows you to both provide and gather information. This enables you to enter global markets and identify new business opportunities to generate more business for your own business.
Internet marketing also has serious limitations. There is great competition for visitors’ attention. This means that your Internet communications, like your traditional communications, must help distinguish you and your business from your competition.
Hot Tip
As discussed in Chapter 17, it is important to monitor clients’ satis-faction. As well as hard-copy-based client satisfaction surveys, an Internet presence can provide a good feed-back loop for your clients. One of my suppliers has a client satisfaction survey on its Web site and includes a request on its invoices that its customers complete the survey. This approach makes it possible to have almost instant client feedback and take any immediate corrective action that might be necessary to ensure continued client satisfaction.
Requires Effective Management
If they are poorly managed, virtually all marketing tools can consume an inordinate amount of time and money. This is particularly true of networking and planned communications such as advertising and promotion. We have all encountered networking junkies who seem to spend more time at networking events than they do looking after clients. Similarly, other businesses seem to commit so many resources to advertising and promotion that they appear to have not much left to look after other aspects.
An Internet presence can present the same risks. Without proper planning and control it can excessively drain precious cash and time.
Integrate the Internet with Other Marketing Tools
The best marketing plans involve striking and maintaining an appropriate balance among all marketing activities. Versatile and attractive as it may appear, an Internet presence is essentially one more element to add to the marketing plan.
Provide Information About Your
Business
There are many ways of proving information about your business. These methods range from detailed messages on your answering machine
to some of the planned communications outlined in Chapter 17. A good Internet presence can be a very effective vehicle for providing useful information about you and your business to clients and nonclients alike.
Entrepreneur Beware
Although an Internet presence can replace some marketing activities, it cannot replace all of them. However, properly executed, it can be very effective in complementing other marketing tools.
Networking
Personal contact remains the basis of success in small businesses. Once contact has been established with another like-minded individual, it is important to keep in touch with this person. Web sites in general and e-mail in particular can help us keep in touch with our contacts. Further, e-mail and selective use of user groups and news groups make it possible to establish and maintain personal contact with a very broad and far-ranging group of people who can help you develop more business.
Electronic mail has proved to be an effective solution to the problem of telephone tag. Contacting others through e-mail has provided a new method of communication, which has both the speed of telephone conversations and the semi-permanence of postal mail.
Building Block
Many people use the Internet to communicate with others who run similar businesses. This allows them to share their ideas, problems, and solutions. Quite often they find that others in their field have already tackled problems similar to their own. They can then get advice on their own situations and create a solution based upon the past experiences of others.
But It’s Also Different from Traditional Marketing Tools
Global Reach
Traditional approaches to telling others about your business are limited to specific groups of individuals in geographically defined areas. Realistically, it is virtually impossible to communicate globally using conventional communication tools. The Internet extends the scope of people with whom you can communicate. It gives you the potential to transmit information to everyone who has access to the Net—more than 70 million people around the world.
Multipurpose
An effective Internet presence will allow you to undertake several marketing activities simultaneously with many people. Conventional activities such as providing information, networking, and measuring client satisfaction cannot normally be completed at the same time. Few of these activities can be done effectively with large groups of people. Taken on individually, they can be very labour intensive and time consuming.
Provide Pictures, Sound, and Film Files
Internet technology makes it possible to add colourful graphics, moving pictures, and sound to individual Web sites. As a result, it is possible to add video clips, cartoons, or computer-generated graphics that demonstrate how products work. Audio clips can add personal greetings and explanations or instructions to enhance the visual elements. This allows you to make video- or audiotapes available to anyone who wants them, anywhere in the world, without the associated reproduction and distribution costs.
Create 24-Hour-a-Day Service
Web pages can provide 24-hour-a-day service seven days a week. By adding the popular Frequently Asked Questions feature, a site can provide answers to the questions that prospective clients most often ask about you and your business. Further, by adding interactive features, the site can offer customized information in response to details provided by site visitors.
Open International Markets
Since Marshall McLuhan first opened our eyes about living in a global village, we have come to realize how small our world really is. However, the jumbled mix of worldwide communication systems such as mail and telecommunications has prevented effective conversation with our village neighbours. With a Web page, it is now possible to open up a dialogue with international markets as easily as you can with the business across the street.
Provide Up-to-Date Information
Quickly
The production and distribution of information in hard copy format can be a very time-consuming process. In our modern world, information often changes before it even gets off the press. With electronic publishing, it is possible to update information as it changes.
How Can the Internet Help with Your Marketing Activities?
The usefulness of the Internet as a marketing tool depends directly on the products or services of your business. Most businesses will be able
to undertake some of the following marketing-related activities.
Identify New Business
Opportunities
Entrepreneur Beware
Although instant publication can quickly disseminate information, the information may not always be totally accurate and well presented. One feature of traditional hardcopy publishing—that is, books, magazines, and newspapers—that is noticeably absent from most electronic publish-ing is the presence of editors. Although writers often curse these people, they do help ensure the accuracy of the published material and the elimination of typographical errors. Once unedited material has been published on the Internet, errors are there for the world to see.
Many people are continuously on the lookout for new and innovative ideas as viable commercial
ventures. Users on the Internet are constantly coming out with such new ideas, not only because of the research traditions of the Internet but also because of the cooperative atmosphere that surrounds the Internet. By checking out several small-business discussion groups, you will no doubt come up with more ideas for new business opportunities that could possibly be implemented. It is also possible to identify opportunities in the form of businesses active in other geographic markets but not in yours. Whether totally new, or simply new to you and your market, many exciting opportunities can be identified on the Net, often on business Web sites.
Identify Customer Needs
Continuing to identify and meet your clients’ needs is critical if you are to succeed in your business. Traditional approaches to monitoring clients’ changing needs have involved keeping in touch with clients, which includes attending the same events that they attend and reading the same material that they do. Essentially these approaches make it possible to identify the issues that matter to clients.
Internet discussion groups allow people who share similar interests to discuss issues of mutual concern. Thus, by monitoring the online discussion of your clients or others like them, you can keep up to date on what concerns your clients have and how you might be able to help them.
Distinguish Yourself and Your Business
If you have an Internet presence but your competition doesn’t, you have already differentiated your business from the competition.
If, on the other hand, your competition does have an Internet presence, by checking out what they say about themselves, you can design your site and its contents to reinforce the unique aspects of your business. Further, your competitors’ Web sites are obvious sources of information about them, making it easier for you to differentiate your business from theirs.
Identify External Challenges
As an information source, the Internet is rich with news about economic and market considerations that could affect your clients and your business. Diligent research will help you learn more about factors such as economic and environmental trends, product innovation, technical advances, and new governmental regulations and how these might affect your business.
Develop More Business
An Internet presence is an ideal way to inform existing clients about all of your service offerings; they may not be aware of some of the services you offer. You can also solicit suggestions for new goods or services that your clients might like.
The Internet is a ready base of several million people from all walks of life. An Internet presence is an obvious vehicle to promote new services to existing and to new clients. In promoting your existing services to potential clients you can add testimonials from satisfied clients.
Further, a well-designed Web site can provide the opportunity to research new services and in some cases test them out.
What Can You Not Do on the Internet?
The Internet has developed its own set of written and unwritten rules about commercial ventures. It has several commercial backbones, which allow commercial traffic. However, the general Internet community has strong feelings about advertising on the Net. Before undertaking any form of advertising, make sure that what you propose is consistent with advertising practices that are currently found on the Net.
The traditional form of broadcast advertising over the Internet has proved to be unsuccessful. Internet users are involved in an interactive media—unlike radio or television broadcast systems—and most users take it personally when they receive unsolicited material. For example, many people have tried advertising openly on discussion groups or Internet mailing lists by posting or mailing out an advertisement to these groups or lists. These have been met with open hostility by many members in the form of flaming criticisms. The advertiser often gets deluged with e-mail complaints of its activities. Often networks have been shut down because of the number of complaint e-mails they received.
Another consideration is the difficulty of communicating effectively with words alone. Communication experts tell us that the words we use comprise the smallest component of our communication effectiveness. In spoken communications, for example, it has been estimated that perceptions of our believability are influenced as follows: 7 per cent by the actual words we use; 38 per cent by our tone of voice; and a surprising 55 per cent
by our body language. Clearly, the major influence on the believability of our communications is the combination of nonverbal factors.
Properly used, the Internet can be a powerful tool that can help in many aspects of marketing. One significant application is in expanding your business, which is addressed in the next chapter.
Entrepreneur Beware
Words on a computer screen, which comprise the bulk of Internet com-munications, are like printed words on paper: These words stand or fall on there own. They cannot be made more believable by a convinc-ing tone of voice or confident body language. Although visual graphics and sound clips might enhance the written words, they cannot totally replace the nonverbal elements of spoken communications. This makes it very difficult to communicate such personal characteristics as integrity and passion through an Internet presence.
E-business, E-commerce,
E-eeekk!
Running an e-business is simply an extension of running a business. As Daniel Armor explains in
The E-business (R)evolution , recently published by Prentice Hall, “E-business is about using the convenience, availability and world-wide reach [of the Internet] to enhance existing businesses or
creating new virtual business.... By connecting your traditional IT systems to the Web, you become an e-business.” As simple as this comment appears, it raises a number of questions.
What IT (information technology) system do you have? How can you go about connecting it to the Web? And, probably the most important question of all, why should you connect it to the Web?
For most small business owners, the desire to connect to the Web is driven more by our society-wide obsession with technology than by well-developed business purposes. As a society, we have become obsessed with technology, spending well over a trillion dollars a year on information technology.
In an ideal world, one would expect that this massive investment of money in IT would yield impressive dividends. Unfortunately, that is not the case. Thomas H. Davenport, a leading authority on the relationship between IT and business economics explains, “Even the most rigorous economists have difficulty finding correlation between IT spending and productivity, profits, growth, revenues, or any other measures of financial benefit.” And that’s not.
all of the bad news. He continues, “Surveys of managers suggest that they feel the information they get today is no better than it ever was.” In a nutshell, this means that the trillion-plus dollars that we spend on IT each year does not significantly benefit business operations. How can that be possible?
Two reasons might be offered for the overspending in information technology. First, we have historically believed that the latest technical innovation would solve, if not all, at least most of our problems. This was true of steam-generated power, railroads, the internal combustion engine, electricity, and so on. Information technology is the latest in a series of promising innovations with the potential to improve the way we do things.
Second, as a consuming society, it is easier to buy something than to identify and take the hard steps necessary to make a difference. Seduced by persuasive advertising, we find it easier to purchase the power tools than to actually build the long-planned addition to the house. It is easier to buy some workout equipment or perhaps a membership in a health club than to take the steps necessary to get into shape. By extension, buying technology is much easier than learning how to manage information effectively.
Davenport explains how this works in practice: “As consultant and author Tom Peters once noted, success in managing information is 5 per cent technology and 95 percent psychology—but most companies do not even spend 1 per cent of their information management time and expense budgets on psychological or human issues.”
Should you go online if only a few, if any, of your customers and other contacts are now online? Hard to say. If you are unsure about whether or not to take the plunge and become an e-business, ask your customers. If it will help them, by all means go ahead. If it won’t make a difference to them, will it still help you? If it won’t help either you or your customers, perhaps it is worth waiting until it will benefit you and your customers before you make the move.
E-commerce is essentially about selling goods over the Internet. Internet selling is best suited for either generic types of consumer goods with mass-market appeal or specialty products with limited appeal. Large organizations like Chapters and high-profile retailers like Roots use the Internet as another sales outlet. This is comparable to catalogue sales. The jury is still out on their success from this method of marketing. At the time of writing this material (June 2000), Chapters have yet to realize a profit from chapters.ca, having reported losses of millions of dollars on its venture.
By offering specialty goods with limited appeal, like antiques or works of art, over the Internet
sellers are trying to extend the reach of their promotional activities. Instead of offering their goods to a limited geographic market, the market can be extended through the Internet to include everyone in the world who might be interested in the specialty goods. And with the extension of the market comes an entirely new set of problems, the most significant of which are how the goods are going to be paid for and delivered.
Are e-business and e-commerce viable options for your business? The answer depends on you, your business, and your customers. As with any major business decision, research it carefully and think it through completely. There is a wealth of information available in books and magazines as well as electronically. Don’t make your decision without doing your research.
The Least You Need to Know
An Internet presence is similar to traditional marketing tools: It is a means to an end that must be managed effectively and integrated with other marketing tools to provide information about your business and to facilitate networking.
An Internet presence can also do more than traditional marketing tools. Among other things, it can extend your reach, give you a 24-hour-a-day presence, and allow you to provide up-to-date information quickly.
Like all technological advances, Internet marketing does have it limitations.
Both e-business and e-commence can, but not necessarily will, help you run your business more effectively and serve your customers better.
If you are thinking about enhancing your existing business into an e-business with an online presence, remember that information techno-logy advertising and promotion
can be seductive. Try to avoid being charmed by the technology component and ignoring the information element of IT.
Entrepreneur Beware
With today’s trend toward big box stores, few small businesses survive selling generic consumer goods in competition with large retailers.
Attractive as the Internet option might be, it will not automatically level the playing field.
