Marketing Your Online Business

Continue Writing Your Business Plan
Demonstrating its commitment to small business owners, HIT Web Design continues to provide insights aimed at helping you start or augment your online business. One of the biggest tasks you face is to write a business plan. We've been sharing with you tips and suggestions on important business topics that make the difference between success and failure. These articles are full of information and suggestions intended to help you in the writing of your business plan—something every business owner, whether new or seasoned, needs to do. In fact, many businesses take the opportunity at the first of each year to redo their business and marketing plans.

The information provided so far has focused on things like branding, identifying your competitive advantage, and many other subjects.

Now, we'll cover another important topic, marketing.

Every business plan needs a marketing strategy, and here we'll provide guidelines for you to follow so you can quickly grasp the importance of your Products, their Pricing, and their Promotion—the three Ps of marketing.

Get Information from Many Internal Sources
Before writing, you'll need to analyze a lot of information in order to create a viable marketing strategy for your business. Therefore, start internally, and work outward. If the company is yours, take time to reconsider your visions and goals for the year. Dream big. Ask yourself, “If money were no issue, and nothing was holding me back, what would I like to accomplish this year?” If you are working for someone and your task is to write the marketing plan, interview the company owners and top executives to find out what their expectations are for the business.

Next, talk to your sales staff. What goals are driving them this year? What are their sales expectations? If you are the sales force, what are your monetary aspirations for the coming year?

Armed with the big picture of your organization, your next step is to put together a marketing and promotion plan that will enable the overall vision of your company to merge into an accomplished goal by year's end.

Now, let's get started!

Identify Your Market
The first thing to do is research your target market. It's a big world out there. Who is it that you plan to sell your products to? Start with a broad description, then narrow it down to subsegments, and then analyze those segments—who are they, where are they, what do they like, what is peculiar about them, what do they read, where do they go?

There are volumes of information available about the Baby Boom Generation, Generation X, Generation Y, the Baby Bust Generation, the Echo Boom Generation, and the Sandwich Generation, just to name a few target markets. Your target market may consist of parts or subparts of these categories, or may be defined by your locality, your industry, or other categories. Figure out who it is you want to sell to and get as much information as possible about them from news articles, marketing forums, posts, and other sources. You'll want to know how much money they are spending collectively, what their ages are, how much money they make, their average family size, their common religions, their neighborhood details, what their occupations are—anything about them.

Next, you'll want to pry into their minds. What are their needs, attitudes, interests, lifestyle, and preferences?

MACRO Analysis
If you can ascertain the total market size in dollars for your target market, you can then determine what percentage of market share you can reasonably expect to capture. This is a top-down approach. For instance, if your online business sells to furniture buyers in a certain city where historically the market has totaled 600 million annually, and if you capture just 1.5% of the market, your online sales need to be at the $300,000 mark. Is that doable? What kind of a campaign do you need to organize in order to sell $300,000 worth of furniture to meet your goals?

MICRO Analysis
On the other hand, you can analyze your market from the bottom up. If your sales invoices have averaged $350 per sale, you can figure out that to hit the $300,000 mark, you'll need to make 867 sales this year. That's 16 sales per week. Can your website produce that? Do you need help your website out with some promotions to make sure?

More importantly, however, do people actually want 867 units of what you have to sell?

Analyze Your Product
Making sure you have a product that meets a demand and fulfills a need is a big part of any marketing plan. If your product is not reliable, is of poor quality, or simply isn't wanted, you'll either have to compensate with excessive marketing expenditures to create a hype and a large number of up-front sales, or you'll have to change your product mix. An example of creating a hype online recently occurred with the movie Paranormal Activity. The promotion marketing team realized they would need to create a huge hype to promote the film, because initial audience screenings indicated a lukewarm response, so they ran trailers on social networking sites showing not clips from the film, but reactions of the audience. This generated a huge “demand it” following that resulted in good initial revenue for the film, insuring that the producer were able to make a good return on their investment. That's the power of good marketing, and smart business owners never minimalize their marketing teams or obstruct their creative endeavors, even when there is no “bottom line” impact that is immediately obvious.

Positioning for Success
Positioning your product is a critical area of concern for your business and marketing plan: what makes you different? How have you taken steps to set yourself and your company above the competition? Consider pricing differences, product variations, process strengths, turn-around time advantages—all of these things, and more, will give you a competitive edge, and should be highlighted in your marketing and promotion efforts.

Price Your Products Right
The laws of supply and demand dictate your pricing strategy. Ignoring reality is a business owner's downfall. The higher the demand, the more you can charge. As demand sluffs off, you'll need to reduce your price to insure you sell your product. Things get more complicated for an Internet business, however, when shoppers can instantly compare your price with a dozen others. Thus, pricing on the Internet demands constant attention and research. A couple of dollars' difference between you and a competitor will cost you a sale.

Also, care should be taken to insure your shipping policies and pricing strategies are competitive. Shop around yourself on your competitors' sites to make sure your policies are in line (or better) than theirs. If you charge unreasonable fees and don't discount shipping (or offer free shipping for certain price breaks), then you will lose customers.

Timing
Before you jump the gun, your marketing analysis should consider whether now is the right time for you to start your business or introduce a new product or service. What market factors indicate possible success? What about your target market? Has its mood changed, making the field more fertile for your business? Are your potential customers actually ready for your products? Do your products match those preferences? What are their spending patterns? Have you built in time in your strategy to work out any kinks?

Are your customers influenced by seasons or locality? Seasonality of products is important to consider when pricing them. Take advantage of high-demand times and increase your price accordingly—don't leave money sitting on the table. Then, when the peak season passes, reduce prices and offer coupons or specials to clear out your inventory. Remember, every shopper loves to feel like they are getting a special deal and great savings, so design sales and limited-time promotions to attract bargain shoppers. When is the right time to introduce advertising, promotions, or public relations events?

Promoting Your Product
Getting people to your site and enticing them to buy is the main marketing challenge for Internet business owners. If you've done your homework on the market, the product, and the pricing, you'll be that much more ahead. But, your tasks don't stop there. Now, you have to promote your site and build your clientèle.

Offering sales and product price reductions to attract buyers is not your only weapon, thankfully.

HIT Offers Specialized Products to Give You the Competitive Edge
There are many techniques you can employ on your website to make it more competitive. Many of these features are available by contacting HIT Web Design. Using these products as part of your marketing campaign is essential to success. These marketing products have been carefully designed to capitalize on Internet habits and buying tendencies. Without such products, your website is not going to effectively capitalize on the traffic you do receive, and you'll find your profit being eroded because you aren't able to consistently sell your products at top dollar.

For instance, you can use HIT Convey, which immediately puts up important messages and promotions when someone arrives at your site so they get your most important message quickly. Research shows that many people know in seven to ten seconds whether or not they will stay at your site, so you have precious little time to capture their interest.

Constant contact with your customers is essential to keeping them. That's where Stay-N-Touch comes in. This product allows you to launch and manage multiple e-mail campaigns so you can provide your customer base with new, useful information about products, industry trends, and other important updates. HIT Web Design recently posted a series of four articles explaining how to make the most out of an e-mail campaign.

E-mail Marketing Tips, Part I: It's Time for a Newsletter Campaign
E-mail Marketing Tips, Part II: Offer More than One Newsletter 
E-mail Marketing Tips, Part III: Boost Your Open Rate 
E-mail Marketing Tips, Part IV: Get More Clicks

Other features include Web Traffic Director, a tool that steers people to your site, guaranteeing a certain number of site visitors. Additionally, target marketing becomes more precise with HIT Convert which allows you to get real-time information from you site visitors so you can fine tune your target marketing efforts with strategic insight.

In conclusion, careful attention to preparing a marketing strategy will help propel your business to greater profits because, in the process of putting the plan together, you will identity the strength of your products and the unique qualities possessed by your company that you can capitalize on.

For more information, please visit http://www.hitwebdesign.com or call 1-866-211-0743.
© 2010 HIT Web Design, L.L.C.

Advertising Your Brand

In previous branding articles, we’ve talked about what a brand is and why you should have one. We also talked about identifying your company’s brand. Once you know how you’re going to brand your company, you need to start thinking about how you’re going to share your brand with your customers.

Branding your organization is an important step in promoting your competitive advantage, distinguishing your business, and establishing a strong customer base.

Advertising your brand begins with your organization’s name and includes your logo, the central message, motto, or point you are emphasizing, and your customer service efforts.

This branding package gives you everything you need to begin creating a distinct identity for your organization, both online and offline.

Your branding should include:

·         Custom logo design

·         Branded organization letterhead

·         Branded business card

·         Branded envelope template

·         Watermarked background image

·         Custom branded e-mail template

·         Custom branded electronic newsletter template

·         Branded e-mail signature

·         A website

All of these and more are available through HIT Web Design. In honor of President’s Day, purchase HIT’s branding package, StayNTouch Marketing, and more, and save 20%. Just mention the promotional code “Jackson” to receive 20% off. This offer expires Feb 16th at 5pm MST.

Competitive Advantage and Call to Action Part I

Competitive Advantage
As defined by BusinessDictionary.com, competitive advantage is:
“Superiority gained by a firm when it can provide the same value as its competitors but at a lower price, or can charge higher prices by providing greater value through differentiation. Competitive advantage results from matching core competencies to the opportunities.”

This definition might sound a little academic, but competitive advantage is what sets you apart from your competition.

Your competitive advantage could be:
Price
Quality
Shipping and handling fees (or lack thereof)
Experience
Customer service
Credibility
Something unique to your industry.


It is important to understand that having a competitive advantage is not an event, but a process. In other words, making and keeping a competitive advantage is ongoing. It becomes a game of trying to stay one step ahead of your competition. You should never feel comfortable with the status quo, but continue to find ways to improve your advantage.

Determining Your Competitive Advantage
The first step to determining your competitive advantage is to know your competition. Take time to research the main players in your industry. A good way to learn about your competition is to do several product keyword searches on Google. Look at each website listed on the first page of the results, both the sponsored and natural listings, to review their products and services.

Now rate your competition based on the list of possible competitive advantages listed above. One of the best ways to do this is to organize a spreadsheet, listing the possible competitive advantages across the top of your page, and then list the companies down the left side of the page, with your company as the top listing. To make things simpler, you might just focus on one top-selling product per spreadsheet.

Compare price, quality, shipping options, and so on. You should start to see some areas where your product or company outshines you competitors, and some areas where you can make simple adjustments that would give you an advantage.


For example, many years ago, when Heritage Internet Technologies started out in the web design industry, this process was used to determine what we had that was unique and different. One glaring item stood out: pricing. No one in our industry could design a custom website for the price point we were offering. For HIT, price became a strong competitive advantage. It is still used today in all of our advertising.