The Right and Left Brain Blog

My colleague, Susan Payton of Egg Marketing & Public Relations, blogs about internet marketing. While it certainly has its relevance and place for businesses, I believe there are other elements of a business that can do as much, if not more than internet marketing to grow a business.

Internet marketing experts provide seminars, webinars, online conferences, etc., which are designed to improve response rates, inquires, and conversions at lower costs. If we believe much of what they argue, our profitability would virtually increase in leaps and bounds every month. We sometimes get so excited about web marketing tools that we forget some of the basic marketing tools, particularly for smaller businesses. My experience is that there are some general realities about our marketing efforts that need to be integrated with our internet ideas to achieve better results:

1. The characteristics of your brand, product, price, and marketing are the most important aspect of a great website. Great marketing or web design is hard to overcome a lousy product.
2. Price, value and competitiveness are underestimated in their importance. Consumers frequently use the internet to compare and look at multiple sites. Lowering price and offering free shipping are the easiest and most effective way to increase sales.
3. Better, not fancier, customer service can dramatically affect sales. Responding quickly, empowering customer service, liberal return policies, and operators who are knowledgeable and speak English are more important than gimmicks like 24-7 responses from representatives in foreign countries that have no clue.
4. Being in stock and shipping quickly is a requirement and not an advantage.
5. Clear, concise explanations can have a dramatic impact. Customers want clear information on the characteristics of the products. Understandable text, sizes, specs, dimensions are all critical elements of a product description.
6. Excellent photography is more important than multiple views that are unattractive or redundant.
7. Improving web design with exotic characteristics like flash, videos, long openings etc. can be counter productive in terms of conveying a simple message. For example, if you have a “skip intro” option on the website, it probably shouldn’t be there.
8. Google and its reporting tools are incredible products and do not need supplements if you are a small to moderate user.
9. Great products and excellent brands are more important than SEO in generating clicks.
10. In general, expensive custom products or totally generic efforts are equally disappointing. There are great models and templates out there to purchase inexpensively. However, they need to be tempered with individual analysis and decision making.

In short, basic management and marketing is a fundamental that must be developed before one tacks on exotic internet marketing tools. In addition they may show much better results than all the dog and pony shows of your competitors.

Internet marketing experts provide seminars, webinars, conferences, etc., which are designed to improve response rates, inquires, conversions, etc. at lower costs. If we believe much of what they argue, our profitability would virtually increase in leaps and bounds every month. We sometimes get so excited about web marketing tools that we forget some of the basic marketing tools we know particularly for smaller businesses. Unfortunately, most of us experience smaller efforts worlds. We spend less than $10,000- $20,000 per month in marketing and achieve less than $5-$10 million in sales per year. For example, one of the top 500 guide lists only about 400 sites with sales above $10 million out of the tens of thousands of sites on the internet.

My experience is that there are some general realities about our marketing efforts that need to be integrated with our internet ideas to achieve better results.

1. The characteristics of your brand, product, price, and marketing are the most important aspect of a great website. Great marketing or web design is hard to overcome a lousy product.
2. Price, value and competitiveness are underestimated in their importance. Consumers frequently use the internet to compare and look at multiple sites. Lowering price and offering free shipping are the easiest and most effective way to increase sales.
3. Better, not fancier, customer service can dramatically affect sales. Responding quickly, empowering customer service, liberal return policies, and operators who are knowledgeable and speak English are more important than gimmicks like 24-7 responses from representatives in foreign countries that have no clue.
4. Being in stock and shipping quickly is a requirement and not an advantage.
5. Clear, concise explanations can have a dramatic impact. Customers want clear information on the characteristics of the products. Understandable text, sizes, specs, dimensions are all critical elements of a product description.
6. Excellent photography is more important than multiple views that are unattractive or redundant.
7. Improving web design with exotic characteristics like Flash, videos, long openingsm etc. can be counter productive in terms of conveying a simple message. For example, if you have a “skip intro” option on the web site, it probably shouldn’t be there.
8. Google and its reporting tools are incredible products and do not need supplements if you are a small to moderate user.
9. Great products and excellent brands are more important than SEO in generating clicks,
10. In general, custom expensive products or totally generic efforts are unproductive. There are great models and templates out there but they need to be tempered with individual analysis and decision making.

In short, basic management and marketing is a basic fundamental that must be developed before one tacks on exotic marketing tools.