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11/01/2010 Are you weaving the threads together?

Despite the Internet having been very much a business reality for several years, we still see many organisations whose approach seems to be “we’ve built a website, the world will now flock to it”. We don’t like to be spoilsports, but the ‘If you build it, they will come’ may have made a great hook for Kevin Costner in Field of Dreams, but that was the movies – and what came were ghosts. Not big shoppers by and large, the dead.

So can we suggest a more pragmatic approach that reaches out to the living without crystal balls or Ouija boards? Think in terms of joining the dots: get an email address – and permission to use it - for existing or potential customers at the first opportunity, so you can exploit the cost-effectiveness of targeting email marketing. Put your web and email addresses on every printed item (stationery, business cards, carrier bags, packaging ... everything!) so it is front of people at every opportunity. Make it as easy as possible for people to sign-up for updates (let people sign up from your website, get your customer-facing staff to automatically ask if they can add anyone they deal with to your list).

Thinking that a website was the platform for doing business over the web was cutting-edge thinking in 2000, but we’ve moved on. In 2010, even email newsletters are only part of the picture – but they’re a start.

If your business is fast moving, one where ‘adding a human face’ is important to customer relationships, or one where you organise frequent events, why not add a blog into your marketing mix? Quick and easy to update, you can have the latest product, details of forthcoming events – or a write-up of the last one – online in minutes.

Take lots of pictures or even video? Well, your blog can incorporate these – and you can set up a YouTube channel or a Flickr account, and link them to your blog. Add in Facebook, add in Twitter (no longer just the preserve of celebrities or people telling you what they had for breakfast, Twitter is becoming a fully-fledged business tool). If business networking or recruitment are big issues for you, don’t forget LinkedIn.

The marketing mix is richer and more complex than just ‘print, web, tv and radio’ now. The web strand has grown a range of new strands, and weaving them into the mix could help you paint a richer picture of your business – and engage your audience more fully than ever before.

Establish regular contact and build an audience, and you have a broader foundation to build on. Once you have the beginnings of a regular audience, you can move on to targeting email marketing (use a platform like EMMA that can build customer profiles with each campaign sent and manage sub-lists that are shaped by customer responses and interests) and using social media – blogs, social networking sites – to keep customers not just in the loop, but even in a dialogue with you.
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