Internet Marketing Strategies for Small Business
Business owners often struggle with internet marketing for small business. They especially struggle when trying to reach an audience that distrusts marketing messages. Even tougher when they dislike talking to salespeople. 
The solution: Give the prospects the resources and education they need so they can make their own decision. This will allow the prospects to choose when they want to talk to you.
It all starts with knowing the customer – the customer profile
If the business owner or marketing manager must segment the different customers in his/her organization. Each customer group needs to be addressed differently. Some customers are purely impulsive, and will buy when they are presented an idea or product right away. If they don’t buy now, they may never buy. Other customers, as is the case for this example, don’t want to talk to anyone, and they need information before they make their decision to buy.
For this article, we’re going to focus on the difficult prospect who is resistant to marketing. Here are the steps that we should consider for the marketing plan:
1) Design website to mirror the customer profile
You need to find out what makes this customer “tick”. What do they like? Dislike? Do they like “boring information” or do they prefer to be entertained with humorous video?? The website needs to fit the customers, not the business owner.
2) Create web content for different stages of the buying process
Informational Stage – this stage represents the earliest stage of the buying process. People want to research about your product or service, so they need informative articles, blog posts, etc. If they don’t get the information from you, they will continue to search elsewhere until they find someone who DOES give them the information.
The company that controls the information stage is the one who gains the initial loyalty of the prospect and will usually end up with the sale when the customer is ready to buy.
Free Items
This stage progresses the “researcher” to take some form of action that doesn’t involve the prospect to spend any money. Each business is different, of course, but this could merely be some free trial, an e-book on the various types of services that the person can read about right away, a trial membership, etc. There must be a perceived value for this free item. The value needs to be placed on the high side of reality. $500 value for a movie ticket, for example, is outrageous and will counter act the benefit you wish to recieve. A $50 value for a complimentary dinner is more in line. I think you get the idea. Another idea could be to offer a “free” membership into your companies “preferred readers’ program that is limited and has a value of $50 monthly. You could simply give them a password to have access to articles and your newsletter that you would probably have given to them anyways.
Consideration Stage
Once you have the prospects trust and loyalty, you can offer them a free trial for your product or service. Price quotes are also an area where prospects can request from an online form.
3) Drive Traffic to your site through multiple channels
In order to maximize your leads, you want to make sure you have more than one avenue to driver your traffic. If you only utlize one website and hope to have people “find you”, you are only kidding yourself. The saying “If you build it they will come”, does not apply to marketing on the internet. Multiple blogs, press releases, etc. must be done if you are to be successful.
e-Book one…
I found your entry interesting do I’ve added a Trackback to it on my weblog
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Interesting read, thanks! I finally see the larger picture
Awesome – come back for more – we will continue to give good tips that will hopefully help your advertising and marketing.
I saw your site on Bing, I will come back to visit and refer my friends.
Thanks – will do our best to give you some great marketing tips.
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Thank you so much for posting a lot of this awesome content! I am looking forward to checking out more posts.
Too Good! I liked it!!
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Nice one! If I could write like this I would be well chuffed. The more I read articles of such quality as this (which is rare), the more I think there might be a future for the Net. Keep it up, as it were.
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loving this website, good thing I stumbled it for you on stumble upon.
I enjoyed this. Where is your contact details though?
You made some good points there. I did a search on the topic and found most people will agree with your blog.
I wanted to say that it’s nice to know that someone else also mentioned this as I had trouble finding the same info elsewhere. This was the first place that told me the answer. Thanks.
I’m glad we could help – keep checking back as we’ll be posting anything and everything to help small business sort out this “internet advertising confusing mess!”
Yikes this definitely takes me back, where is your contact details hmm?
found you on digg, darn happy I did, best post Ive read all day.
Thanks -
The maker of this entry should be immensely proud. I do like to reckon myself to be in possession of a sharp eye for writing, and posts such as this truly do make me smile. Keep it up.
And you have a flair for passing out comments! Thanks for the kind words – I hope these posts help you and other business owners understand the new marketing of today!
Wow this really takes me back, sending this to my mates now.
You made some good points there. I did a search on the topic and found most people will agree with your blog.
Excellent posting! I love your website, will it be acceptable to utilize it for resyndication?
No problem – happy to have the word spread! Thanks for the kind words.
Bookmarking now thanks, a good fast read.
I enjoyed reading this, like your blog design too. Must be Drupal?
This is a subject close to my heart cheers, do you have a RSS feed I can use?