As a marketer trying to succeed in the battle for mindshare, you need to get the largest portion of the brain involved. Satisfy the need for information. Provide meaningful, engaging content. Provide a method of interacting and satiating the quest for knowledge that uses more of the brain and the individual becomes more involved. The consumer or agent needs to have both the ability (power) and the information (knowledge) to make decisions.
Further, people must trust your ability to provide all of the above. Building marketing relationships, like relationships in general, implies some type of interaction. Netizens are inquisitive and more than willing to tell you what they think. It is also one of the few common characteristics of the CyberSpace community that they will. If you or your company have the reputation for being open to input and meeting the needs of the CyberSpace community, the potential for a marketing relationship strengthens.
Admittedly, this is something that hasn’t been possible before. Billboards don’t stay in sight very long, and TV spots are short and expensive. The sales pitch can now be pitched in favor of dialog.
Electronically mediated commerce is possible over the Internet. Marketers, however, need to understand another subtle change when dealing with netizens. The relationships that become established between buyer and seller in CyberSpace are virtual relationships.
On an information content basis (the gathering stage), these interactions can be made to be more enriching than the oft times impersonal contact with a retail sales force that too frequently seems to be under-trained. In the mundane world, however, the buyer can at least touch the goods. In the absence of the hands-on experience, confidence in a product, and trust in a company, must be established virtually. What you give back, or your positive participation in the virtual community is one of the ways you can build this reputation.
This is the type of relationship that must, and can be, built using the existing tools and standards of the Internet. Through the World Wide Web you can take the netizen on a journey of exploration and information gathering. At the same time, you must make the same information immediately accessible to regular customers and logically findable by search engines. You can be seen as an organization or individual who cares about meeting the buyers needs, either by helping them make an informed decision, or merely by brightening their day a little.
By using e-mail, or real-time communications such as video, speech, chat, and interactive Web sites, the buyer/seller relationship can be established and maintained. The dialog that has been established can then be enhanced with electronically available information about your product, service, or company.
When designing a virtual presence in CyberSpace, the hopeful marketer should remember that this is not a traditional mass market. The paradigm for getting and holding attention has changed. User controlled information gathering and presentation means that merely scanning your brochure and logo onto a home page will be marginally effective at best.
Word of mouth travels at light speed in CyberSpace, and if those words are negative, they seem to flow even faster. You want to close a sale, or at least leave people with the warm fuzzies so when it is time for them to buy, you product or service is their first choice. It seems to be almost too obvious a point, but before any money flows through the Matrix, people are going to have to feel very comfortable in transferring their e-cash to you.
So, now that you’ve decided you can enhance your marketing efforts by properly utilizing the Internet, the first steps of project planning need to be taken care of. Are you trying to budget your time, an existing or new staff position, or decide if you should outsource? Unsure if the time and budget estimate you’ve been given for an Internet presence is at least close to reality? Here’s what I’ve discovered over the past three years of active web development and maintenance.
Content that is stale is quickly overlooked. Once people get over their initial enamor with the ‘net, they start paying much more attention to the content. You can definitely grab their attention with flashy graphics, but you need to hold them on your site, and give them a reason to add you to their already unmanageably large hotlist. The web site needs to be updated and enhanced on a fairly regular basis.
With a small site that consists of a half dozen pages and a simple customer contact input form you should be prepared to spend at least two weeks in getting the site put together, tested, and announced. The ongoing maintenance will take about 20 hours a month, and be prepared to spend 2-3 times that on some months. This will take care of basic server administration such as cycling the logs, generating statistics and demographics, network related e-mail, and quick content updates.
If you’re going to take the time to monitor the proper resources to get new links to your site, add another 5 to 10 hours per month. Are you going to process web forms and contacts through e-mail, then add about 1 hour per day. We’re now up to at least a ½ time position, and remember that this is with a fairly modest virtual presence. And what are the skills that this position requires?
Familiarity with computer networks and human networking, direct marketing, and electronic design and layout. More than a passing familiarity with human-computer interface design issues is also necessary to keep your site from becoming little more than an exercise in frustration to the end-user and potential customer. If you want a lot of flash, throw in graphic design for good measure.
On the programming side, a solid background in information systems, client-server design, database design and search algorithms will be more than just nice to have. Also be prepared to spend 10 to 20 hours per month keeping up with new and changing standards.
Outsourcing to a company that understands and works with the CyberSpace culture to present and promote your virtual presence to the worlds largest community begins to make a lot of sense. Even though one of the most interesting characteristics of the CyberSpace community is that it self-selects into vertical markets and targeted special interest groups, it is still a time consuming proposition that requires more than a little expertise to utilize properly. And that is what you must do in order to maximize your return on investment.
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Questions or comments about these Web pages? Send e-mail to
dave@reststop.net