Internet Marketing and eCommerce Expert – Nigel Burke's Blog

This is a guest post by Sara Lundgren who designed, setup and analysed the data from a recent survey that I sent out to our web hosting customers. This is part 1 of 2.

To get to know our customers better, AVS networks sent out an online survey to all of our customers, and the results we got were very interesting.

Purpose for online presence
The number one reason for our customers’ online presence seemed to be “to provide information”, followed by “marketing” and “communication”. An interesting comment than one person made was “because in 2009 you are expected to have a website”. While this is very true, it might also be a good idea to put some extra thought into what the primary purpose behind your website is. Simply being online is not enough.

Where does your website fit into your marketing strategy?
You also need to figure out where your website fits into your overall marketing strategy. Is the principal purpose with the website to market your products? Get more traffic to you brick and mortar store? Selling products? Positioning your brand? What is your brand positioning? And is the online brand image coordinated with your offline brand image? If you have a clear message it will be a lot easier to communicate it successfully.

Types of online marketing
The majority of the AVS customers  are not actively marketing online, but the ones who do uses Search Engine Optimisation, e-mail marketing and Google advertisements. Interestingly enough, only a small number uses Social

Media marketing.
We all know that word-of-mouth is one of the most powerful tools to market your product offline. Why? Because having someone else talk favourably about you product is always more powerful than saying it yourself. Having said that, if social media is used in the right way it will lead to positive word-of-mouse which will be way more effective than any other marketing campaign you can create.

Marketing channel of the future
With this information in mind, I’m surprised than more companies aren’t using social media. It is definitely the marketing channel of the future. I believe that social media is so powerful because it makes interaction possible. Social media invites the customer to be part of the marketing process, if fact, it puts the customer in charge. The consumers are no longer passively fed with mass marketing messages, but can pick and choose between the millions of marketing messages that they are buried in every day. The marketing messages that the consumer likes will be passes along to other consumers. A social media campaign that is run smoothly will therefore be very effective.

Online strategy – why do I need one?
Another interesting point in the survey was that most companies did not have an online strategy, but almost everyone still believed that having an online strategy is important. By being online without a proper strategy, many businesses have neglected the most effective marketing tool that they have: their internet presence. Many of these companies spend thousands of dollars on web-design and development, but fail to plan and implement a good online strategy. In her online article about internet strategy  (http://marketing.about.com/cs/internetstrategy/a/aanetmarketinga.htm), Laura Lake compares being online without a proper strategy to starting a business without a business plan, placing an yellow pages ad in an irrelevant category or paying thousands of dollars to have a billboard ad created and placed where there is no traffic. Which is something no business owner in his right mind would do.

Summary
So, my advice for all the small and medium size businesses out there for 2010 is to START PLANNING. Evaluate your business goals, your brand positioning and make sure you are sending out the right message. Put some thought into your website and what you want it to communicate, and try to incorporate social media marketing into your new online strategy.

A good way to start is by conducting a survey among your customers!

A news reader allows you to subscribe to your favourite blogs and read them all in one area.

Some of the popular news readers include Google Reader and Microsoft Outlook.

You may have seen the RSS icon on blogs and some normal websites. Whenever a new post or change is done to that website, the change is sent to your reader.

Some blogs only show a summary of the posts making you click on the link if you want to read the full post. Some blogs show the entire post in the RSS feed. Images and videos are shown in posts with a reader.

The benefits
You can read all the blogs and newsgroups in one area. If you are subscribed to a lot of blogs, you will appreciate the time saved instead of visiting every blog individually checking and reading new posts.

How to set up Google Reader
This is very simple. Create or login to your Google account. Click on News Reader and follow the prompts.

Using Google Reader
I start everyday by reading the latest blog posts from industry leaders. It allows me to stay up-to-date with the latest trends in Internet Marketing and eCommerce.You to would benefit from staying ahead of the competition and knowing the latest developments in your field.

I have my own opinions which I express on this blog which a lot of people read everyday. Learning how to start your own blog is a whole post, just to introduce the concept to you so we will leave this one for today.

Wrap Up
What can I say? If you’re not using a news reader, you wouldn’t be reading many blogs and not staying ahead of your competition!

The New York Times is expected to announce that they are going to start charging to read the news on their website. Nobody knows how much they are going to charge if they go ahead with it.

News Corporation recently blocked Google from indexing their articles and it seems they will be coming out with a paid model soon as well.

This is known as a paywall where you have to pay a subscription fee or a per article fee to read your news online.

It brings up an interesting question – Are you willing to pay to read the news online?

The research
Research figures around the Internet say that some people are willing to pay up to $3 a month to read the news online – which is currently free. It’s not a lot when people pay around $1 per day for a daily newspaper.

I guess people are more willing to pay something they can touch such as a newspaper than pixels on the screen.

Online advertising
If you have recently visited http://news.com.au, you will see advertising all over the place. It is getting more and more animated and in your face. Sometimes it takes over the entire screen!

If they are going to charge to read the news online, they will need to drop all the advertising. People will not pay if there are ads on the page.

Has the free-to-read advertising model stopped working? When was the last time you clicked on a banner from a news website. The advertising is usually very untargetted and the people visiting the website are there to read the news. Not to be sold products and services. If they were searching for something, they’d use Google or Yahoo.

Wrap Up
Are you willing to pay to read the news online? Do you think this new pricing model for newspaper websites work?

I do not believe they will get any more revenue from switching to this pricing model of a paywall. They might change back to the free model when they realise that not many people are going to pay to read the news online.

What are your thoughts?

This is a follow up to the blog post I did called – Magazines and Newspapers are Dying.

The Magazine Publishers of America have released the 2009 data for magazine advertising revenue and number of advertising pages.

Magazines in the US have suffered a large drop in revenues and pages last year (2009).

Here are some examples in advertising revenue -

• Business Week – Down 31.2%
• Fast Company – Down 26.9%
• GQ – Down 22.4%
• Inc. – Down 46.4%
• Maxim – Down 18.7%
• Newsweek – Down 30.4%
• People – UP 3.8%
• Rolling Stone – Down 14.7%
• Scientific American – Down 41.8%
• Ski – Down 29.4%
• Skiing – Down 40.4%
• Sports Illustrated – Down 12.8%
• Time – Down 13.3%
• Transworld Snowboard – Down 17.5%

Overall, magazine revenue is down 18.1% and the number of pages for advertising is down 25.6%. This is a huge blow to the magazine industry in the US. I can only imagine that Australia will have similar results unfortunately.

Source

Social media is one of the best marketing tools for many businesses. The entreprenuers has come up with a great idea, turned it into a great product or service and then cleverly used social media to launch the service.

This is smart marketing. What other marketing tools cost only your time and effort? What other marketing tool allows you to reach billions of people quickly?

Just like the real world, word of mouth marketing is a powerful tool. Social media is the online version of word of mouth.

The entreprenuer now has a large business and the cash is rolling in. Everyone in the social media world has done the hardwork to get the work out there. He sells his business and can now retire.

What about products and services that suck?
We’ve all bought products and services that have not lived up to their promises. Do we keep our experience to ourselves or do we tell all our friends in our online social world who then tell their friends?

Chances are many people will complain about the product or service that sucked. These in turn shows up when potential customers research the product or service. When they see bad reviews, you have just lost the customer!

Remember the old sayings – it takes 9 good comments to make up for one bad comment? And bad word of mouth travels faster than good word of mouth?

What to do?
When you launch your product or service online – make sure that you’ve got a fantastic product. Then you can get people excited about it and talking about it. This will spread good word of mouth and a successful business.

Are you focusing on social media before your product is ready?