Knowledge Archives
http://www.co-internet.net/net/articles/dotcomroadkill.txt.html

Don't become .com Road Kill
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by
Lee Traupel
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Remember those Super Bowl and World Cup commercials
where you saw talking hand puppets, scantily dressed
women, cowboys herding cats and crude lettering on
cardboard? Can you actually name one .com company that
paid for these millions of dollar/eurodollars for
brand awareness ads?

Doesn't this type of marketing remind you of a IPO.com
frenzied "drunken sailor school of budgeting" -
meaning, spend like a drunken sailor hitting his/her
first port of call in years, with no thought other
than "brand awareness" coming to mind? Got the picture
yet? Want the cliff notes to the rest of my article?
Three words repeated from my header - "target
customers online."

Some do and don'ts, with the do's first:

1) Think digital marketing - use keywords your
customers may punch in to a search engine to find your
site throughout your overall online and offline
marketing processes. This forces you to stay focused
on your customer niche and ensures context relevancy
for your web site. The latter is becoming critical to
garner high rankings on Alta Vista, Google and
Inktomi.

2) Advertise cost-effectively online where your
customers go - this doesn't have to be top tier web
sites (more expensive typically); but can be second or
third tier community sites. Use online media buying to
save money; look at One Media Place, formerly Ad
Auction for some unsold inventory and bid with the
best of them for a deal!
< http://www.onemediaplace.com >

3) Feature opt-in e-mail as a centerpiece of your
marketing campaign - now is the time to negotiate a
90-120 day media plan with some of the market leaders.
Yes Mail (one of our favorites) is offering a discount
of 10-30%. And, use HTML rich media, your ad copy will
look much better, in turn driving a better
clickthrough results. We work with and highly
recommend a top tier graphics design firm, Kate
Kreates < http://www.katekreates.com > - they do
great work, have years of experience, a pleasure to
work with and provide low cost/high value.

4) Immerse your business with the online community -
post to Newsgroups announcing a special online
contest, promotion or giveaway that builds over a
finite period of time. Get those geeks talking in the
virtual world - remember the truism of good PR, any PR
is better than no PR.

5) Ask your existing customers where they would
recommend your advertising to reach them online.
Everybody likes to have their opinions valued - so
reach out and ask for their input, you'll be
pleasantly surprised.

6) Think and act like a guerrilla marketing type -
incorporate "guerrilla marketing" techniques to drive
your business in unique ways. Go to the source, the
guy who coined the term and many of the processes, Jay
Conrad Levinson http://www.gmarketing.com

Ready for some don'ts?

1. Don't use TV, Radio or Billboards unless you have
lots of money to spend (read millions typically). Yes,
they work to develop brands, but be aware of the
disconnect factor when you are trying to reach online
customers. When was the last time you jumped up from
the TV set to write down a URL you saw splashed across
a screen or stopped your car driving down your local
boulevard when you saw a billboard that caught your
attention? Not very often!

2. Don't pay top dollar for banner advertising -
negotiate a good deal for yourself and don't believe
the sales rep when they tell you all inventory is sold
out! There is lots of unsold inventory out there, just
look at the number of "house ads" (done for the
company who owns the site and published on their site)
being run on many web sites. Do some old-fashioned
digital horse-trading and leverage your media buy!

3. Don't base your business on the "high tide raises
all boats model" - there is definitely a storm brewing
and we don't mean just at your local movie theater
with George Clooney starring (sorry ladies). We are
telling our clients to batten down the hatches and
leverage their marketing dollars as much as possible -
the party is over, time to get down to building viable
business models based on selling tangible goods and
services.

4. Don't use biz speak verbiage in your marketing
processes - if I see another site that has "first
mover advantage" quoted throughout the site I am going
back to the radio for news/information. Be real, tell
people what you do, how you do it and what the value
is based on - enabling them to quickly (it's the
web……..) understand what your business is all about.

This text may freely be republished or distributed in unmodified form provided the following resource box is included intact either at the beginning or the end of the article and a complimentary copy or notice (link) is sent to the author at the address specified below:

Ralph Tegtmeier is the co-founder and principal of fantomaster.com GmbH (Belgium), < http://fantomaster.com/ >, a company specializing in webmasters software development, industrial-strength cloaking and search engine positioning services.

He has been a web marketer since 1994 and is editor-in-chief of fantomNews, a free newsletter focusing on search engine optimization, available at: < http://fantomaster.com/fantomnews-sub.html > You can contact him at mailto:fneditor@fantomaster.com
(c) copyright 2002 by fantomaster.com
All rights reserved.
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