This Post is for whom are new in online marketing, you are finding vendors but require some more information
90% of business starting a website is about sales & marketing …
The first thing new customers always ask is web design job reference … Wait ! Go into web development before understanding the full picture is dangerous. Website somehow like an advertising short movie, you still need TV channel to broadcast, a hotline to receive phone calls. Online marketing takes an advantage is that it has lots of way to target different group of customers, you may heard about
- Search Engine Optimization
- Online banners
- Electronic Direct Mail
And some new things recently
- Social networking services
- Blogging
Before building a website, think first
- What is the purpose of your website ?
- Who is your target customers ? Age ? Location ? Function ?
- Which distribution channel you will use to engage targets ? Twitter / Facebook ? Search Engine ? Email ?
- It is a workflow, not one-off price, how and who are going to manage the contents and channels ? You ? Vendor ?
- What you are going to show your targets ? Blog post ? Event details ? Videos ? Tutorials ?
- How people is going to contact you ? Email ? Join members ? Phone calls ?
- How to monitor your online marketing result ?
- The goal ? And how to achieve that step by step ?
Case study : A new individual business starts its online target marketing
Our simplified conversation as below
Keith Yau – Online marketing Consultant |
Patrick – Mechanical Engineer |
| What is the purpose of your website ? | I want clients need product manufacturing in China comes into my previous project page, read my experience and contact me via email for project & cost management and manufacturing jobs. |
| Who is your target customers ? | Product design firms in Canada / America, already have product designs on appearance and need someone to design the mechanical parts and balance the cost
|
| Did you decided any distribution channel ? | No idea, but i heard about search engine, how to do that ? |
| You need to write blog regularly about your previous projects, so that you are content rich and search engine love it. Also, online visitor will trust you only when you have relative experience shown. |
OK, I will try to do that weekly. And I understood it is hard to ask others to help, since no one knows what is my profession. And how to target Canada / America customer ? |
| You can try twitter, it is hot in America countries. You have to register an account, system will suggest you some friends to start. Pick some people in American region and start ! |
OK, I will try it. I’m already 50 years old and not familiar with web interfaces, how can i manage twitter, facebook and my blog easily ? |
| So, you are going to show blog posts to your clients. It better contains image and video to be more rich content. I found a solution to submit blog post through email. This is posterous. All you need to do is write your article on email client like outlook express, thunderbird or gmail. The website will help to upload your post with image as well ! |
Great ! And how about broadcasting over twitter and facebook ? |
| Posterous can also be setup and submit your post automatically to facebook and twitter |
As I told, I ‘m not familiar with Web interfaces, it is harsh for me to set them up. |
| No problem, I can add this to service details as well. I guess you do not want to analysis web statistics yourself. Should I add this to services detail as well ? |
Yes, please do it for me. And also setup twitter, facebook, my website, posterous, monitors … |
| In future, you may need newsletter system to broadcast your message through email. Just put it at a later time and get some contact from twitter first. |
Good idea and let’s go. |
| Let’s try 2 months first, if you find your interest, you may also consider to take a IT training course about online marketing. |
In just 15 minutes, I know what Patrick needs and summarized a service details like below
Keith provide |
Patrick Provide |
A website with
|
Play with twitter and facebook himself and get some contact |
| Setup twitter, facebook and posterous account Connects them together |
Regularly write blog post about his profession |
| Simple web design and as a new business, web design is not that important |
His previous work’s image / Video. Let people know more about him. |
| Keyword and topic suggestion on his blog post Since Patrick may not have the marketing sense |
Make friends with blogger and form alliance in his industry |
| Website statistics analysis by 2 weeks and performance tunning Image alt, meta tag, tag cloud, submit to directories |
|
| Security setup and prevent getting lost valuable content | |
| Ongoing and update plan, tune it monthly |
The plan above setup costed just around USD550 with two 1 hour meetings and require 10 business days.
It is cost effective if you are new to online marketing and would like to get your hands dirty.
You need an online marketing plan as well ? Please contact Keith Yau through email or MSN ~
Keith Yau, Project Consultant in Yubis – Specialist of Drupal, Online marketing, Server solutions and IT training.
Keith Yau 