A hypothetical marketing flow evolving around your E-Commerce site
Marketing is an interesting field of business. It incorporates so much from so many different sectors. There are many methods of doing it, and the methods just keep coming as technology evolves. Conventional methods included admail drops, advertisements in papers and magazines, mailing lists, and so on. Those methods are still popular and still work for certain sectors, but now the market has moved on to include some of the more cost-effective solutions using the internet and the email. But of course, the return ratio is often lower from those sources compared to conventional methods, which is why the conventional methods still have not died. In this article I will try to focus on collecting new clients and their data, and retaining it, especially for small-and-medium enterprises (SMEs) with a relatively low budget.
I’m going to break this down into several steps, based on my past experience and observation of other marketing techniques.
1. Branding, and an Image
First you need to establish an image of yourself that you can establish throughout people’s minds. This is especially critical for SMEs, because SMEs do NOT have the budget to pamper the local market with advertisements like Coca Cola and Nike do. It has to be something that is visually gripping, easy to remember, and visually appealing. It has to be a theme of your business throughout all your material. Your logo, website, brochures, business cards, car decals (if any), letterheads, envelopes, etc. It has to have consistency throughout in order to implant that image into people’s heads. Remember, do NOT skimp out on this stage. It has to be done first. From here you will create all your essential stationary items, and get the basics all set out.
2. Primary Method of Marketing
This is the stage where you determine where you want to spend your marketing money on. This has to be based carefully on many different factors. The factors include these, and more that I cannot all list. In this scenario, I will hypothetically assume I am starting a company that imports high-quality gold-plated audio/video/HDMI cables from China and selling it online to provide cheaper prices than the retailers.
- Who is my main market, based on what I’m selling? i.e. I’m selling high-quality video/audio connectors and HDMI cables at a much lower price than Monster Cables, which has a huge markup (try $129.99 for a 2 metre HDMI cable).
- So now I know my target audience. What language do they speak? What’s the best medium to reach them? i.e. These are the not-so-wealthy people, or technology geeks looking for different types of product of good value. There is no specific language barrier, so it’s safe to go with English, and with some more budget, Chinese would be a good idea too. Let’s target the smaller local newspapers, as well as online magazines, forums and blogs.
- How much budget do I have? i.e. Can I afford to hit Georgia Straight with news ads each week for 8 weeks in a row? Or is that too much?
- How much of a retention and a referral factor do I have? Is it worth it to attempt to build a client database that I can repeatedly farm? i.e. This can spread through word of mouth among enthusiasts and people who are sick of the Future Shop and Monster Cables. “Hey dude I got a gold-plated HDMI cable for $50 at XXXXX.COM!”
- How long will this business be feasible? i.e. Once the HDMI market takes over, the need for conventional Component/S-Video outputs will decrease, so ultimately I need to focus on the HDMI sales.
So we have these factors considered. Now, I have to make a more specific step-by-step plan to incorporate the above factors.
- The name of my business should include the HD factor - High Definition - which is the new wave of Video/Audio transmission these days. Also, these will be sold online for cheaper pricing, hence the company name should be the domain name as well. So let’s think along the lines of highdefstore.ca, HDM.COM (High Definition Marketplace), HDstore.ca, megaHDcables.com, iHDMI.com and such.
Now let’s come up with the logo and such. Since we are selling to a demographic that is into technology, we need a clean-cut, modern looking logo and a scheme that goes with it. Also, because high-def video/movie sources are on disks still, we will incorporate a shape of a DVD or Bluray Disk. Here is a very quick sample logo I made out of the spur - I know the CD shape could have been done better but time’s a factor here.- We don’t want to be seen as some company offering cheap stuff. Let’s spend the extra money to have our logo and what not printed on all the shipping boxes, invoicing slips and etc.
- So the tagline - let’s make it obvious that our competitive edge is in the cheaper prices compared to the retailers, for the same quality. “High Definition at a Low Price” sounds like a catchy tagline with a good pun. “High Definition without the High Price Tag!!” also is OK. Toss in better ideas of you may.
- We already know that this will be sold online so we need an E-Commerce website. These are technologically enhanced people we’re selling to, so we’d probably want to spend the extra dollars on a fully-customized website rather than a template-based website. Also since this is the primary source of sales, we want to incorporate the sales tracking and billing in this system, so a well-built back-end system would be critical. Even phone-orders will be punched into the online module for the hell of it to keep all data consistent.
- Now let’s think about the referral factor here. Word of mouth is huge for this type of business. So we want to keep a comprehensive database of people who bought our products, and allow them to opt-in for email newsletters for special pricing, new products, etc. Remind them of us, and they will tell their friends even if they don’t want to buy. Also remember that because this is an E-Commerce website, their shipping addresses are all logged. This is a brilliant way to do 2 things at once - sell, and create a client database!
- How do we get the initial word out? There are people looking for cheaper deals of this sort on Google, and Ebay. Let’s put up a few auctions on Ebay that link back to our site. Ebay generated sales are to be considered promotional at a cheaper price, but on each sale listing, put a big banner/link back to our actual site, www.iHDMI.com. Offer them free shipping if they order directly through the website, or something else to entice them to deal directly through your site rather than Ebay. Also, put some money into Google Ads in order to appear as a selected search-result when somebody searches “HDMI cables” or “discount audio cables” etc.
- Go around the internet, find personal blogs or forums that talk about audio/video and other relevant topics. This is an excellent market for people to find out new information, and the word-of-mouth factor can be huge. Post entries that are not too intrusive and promotional, but points them directly towards your site. Also, a good idea would be to toss a forum onto your own site for product reviews, discussions, etc. and create your own online community. This might be tough, and requires you to be diligent in adding posts and new articles all the time. But it’s worth it.
- With a higher budget, try advertising in smaller local newspapers. The Vancouver Sun is quite expensive so let’s leave that til later when you’re bigger. For now, contend with the Courier, Georgia Straight. Also, we all know that technology has no boundaries of ethnicities - in fact, the Asian/East Indian market are often even more into these things, so let’s put some translated ads into Chinese/Korean/Iranian papers.
Ok, you’re probably getting bored but there is a wealth of other creative methods to get this company up and running. Call me for your own consultation, or you can also add some comments here.
But as you can see, depending on your budget, target, and other factors, there are many creative and effective ways to achieve many things at once, creating a powerful tool to obtain and retain business.
I find the key to marketing is to be sure you track your results. If you do not get the ROI you want from it or not sure what ROI is then you should really hire someone that knows what they are doing to market for you.
Yes, that was going to be the next theme… Tracking, and adapting to the figures as they come in. Remaining flexible to different curveballs is important.
Truly the term “marketing” has be slaughtered and frankly, as a marketeer, I’m insulted. Yes, marketing is a cornucopia of genres, all mixed and slathered together, but frankly marketing is very specific and deserves as niche classification. So often web designers and finance professionals alike try and shove a plate full of bad marketing advice across the table and mark it as grade “A.” It doesn’t work that way.
Measurement is key, yes. But, it depends on the problem of which you’re finding the solution. Too often people outside, and some inside, the marketing field rely solely on statistics and other measurable numbers, but if you don’t apply innovation, creativity and plain hard, long thought to the initial solution to your problem, the end-numbers don’t mean crap!
I commend you on trying to produce quality content worth reading, but reaching to the depths of distribution channels, logistics, and the other thousand facets of marketing - that are based on various types of markting - is going to leave a lot of people in the dark once they’ve reached their own critical mass - confusion.
With your specialization being the web-based market, you ought to write a white paper on what you know, specifically and attract non-using, potential clients to your products and services. Otherwise you’ll find jerky marketers like myself laying down bad comments.
I’ll stick around to see what you come up with -
That’s a nasty remark but nontheless all fair. The above article is sort of a hypothetical scenario and I guess I should have specified that this is internet marketing, not general marketing. You’re right, there are other sides of things I do not know about and I specialize more on the online market of things.
My clients who are at that level often have their own side of the “big” marketing scheme covered, and are often very specific with their instructions to me so I usually don’t worry about it that much. Although I do intend to take some schooling/classes on statistics etc.
Thanks for your comments! Cheers.
p.s. Mind if I link some of your blog articles to my blog? Of course you’ll be fully credited.
By the way. How the hell did you end up here? I didn’t think anybody other than my friends who I forced to subscribe/leave comments would see this anyhow.. which explains why I’m just putting stuff up as it comes without thinking too much. I thought I was alone here.
I personally agree with Seth Godin’s defeniition of marketing.
It is an interuption.
A business will find that they will do better if they are in the news (which is free) then being beside the news.
Jeff, please do. I apologize if I came off as nasty. Truly I think you have an excellent outlet for specialized information. With a slightly stronger push of your services, I imagine you’d increase business and brand awareness quite well.
Good luck to you.
Brendon