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How Best To Use The Web To Market Your Company: Part1
Going global has never been easier and more affordable for a small to medium size enterprises (SME), especially from the relative comfort of ones own factory, shop or home office. While traditional marketing channels have included trade shows, catalogs and trade associations, the Internet has introduced new tools to bring trading partners together by using search engines, portals and online marketplaces.
But which channels should a small business with a limited marketing budget choose? Should it buy keywords from search engines or establish a storefront on e-marketplaces, or both? What is the right online marketing mix for an SME?
Having a company profile online and being easily found by search engines is the first step for any company engaging in e-commerce. Search engines are good for mass marketing to a wide audience and addressing the so-called 'long tail' of the Internet.
But for sellers there are pitfalls. A search engine is more consumer traffic driven with no budget guarantee, so costs can accumulate without any reasonable assurance of sales. There is also a serious global issue of click fraud, whereby competitors click repeatedly to increase your pay-per-click advertising costs. At this time, there is no known solution that can eliminate 100% of click fraud. A separate problem is the need to build and maintain a website, which can be an additional heavy burden for small companies that might not have the resources or budget for this.
Buyers need to be aware that search engines have no authentication and verification, so they can never be sure if a site they have found is from a legitimate company or a phish website until they do their own investigation. Professional buyers often find search engines less helpful because the wide variety of website formats found makes it hard work to compare one seller to another.
Search engine results can cover virtually anything available on the World Wide Web. This includes information from businesses as well as associations, governments, institutes and even individuals. The value of an 'online business card' is decreasing as companies now compete with millions of other sites for a favourable search result ranking. Virtual marketplaces have emerged to fill the need of suppliers for targeted brand exposure.
A lot of companies are now heavily using social networking platforms to increase their brand awareness. One of the most popular social networking sites to date is Twitter, which was launched May 2007. You have the benefit of having individuals getting connected to your brand; whether it is a blogger seeking more readers or politicians who utilize twitter to garner more voters. It is so popular that even the now president of America, Barack Obama, used it during his presidential campaign.
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