You own a small business. Do you need a website? Best News Mag  An Internet presence can be a necessity or a resource-draining boondoggle, depending on your business and target audience. You shouldn’t build or maintain a website simply because “everyone else has one.” However, even if you own a one-person services company and get all the business you can handle through word of mouth, you can still create an online presence with minimal time and expense if and when you do develop a business website.

You’ll need to make some investment in Internet-based marketing. Consumers increasingly and overwhelmingly use the Internet to research and buy goods and services. This means the competition is robust, and if your site doesn’t announce its presence, it will simply sit and gather (virtual) dust in some computer’s memory.

Internet MarketingSuppose you’ve convinced yourself that you must enter the web marketing arena. In that case, the following report provides a fundamental primer on the most widely used tactics for paid and free Internet advertising. Just remember that each of the topics introduced here is complex enough that there are entire books written about them, so if something appeals to you, do some additional research before jumping in.

Contents Summary show

Before You Start

There are two main questions you must ask yourself before starting any marketing efforts, whether on- or offline: “Who is my audience?” and “What are my objectives?”

Audience

The audience for most business marketing activities is past, present, and future customers. However, as in traditional advertising and marketing, it helps to narrow down who you are trying to reach, segmenting your market by age, geography, gender, interests, and occupation. Certain Internet marketing methods, such as pay-per-click ads, allow you to target your customers based on this type of segmentation.

Objectives

We can assume that the overall objective of most marketing is to sell products and services, but you may have additional goals for online marketing. Hopefully, these related objectives will drive increased sales, but they can be more subtle than simply asking customers to buy now. For example, your online marketing plan might include goals such as these:

After defining your audience and marketing goals, you can formulate an Internet marketing strategy and tactics. When getting into online marketing, you must maintain brand consistency. Build on the reputation that you have already established. Your online presence should mirror your “brick and mortar” presence. Use the same logo and tagline so that people will understand that you are the same company. Having an online presence is a way to build on what you have already accomplished. In the remainder of this report, we’ll look at the most common ways you can use the Internet to deliver your message and increase your sales.

Table of Contents

We won’t get into the vast topic of building and managing a website, but if you aim to use the techniques described below, it is nearly essential to have one. Most of your marketing efforts will have a “call to action” that involves your audience visiting your website to research products or services and find contact information.

Sign up for a newsletter or place an online order. Whatever you ask people to do in your online promotions, ensure the website lets them complete that task easily. Another vital component of any business website is an analytics program (Google offers a fairly robust application free of charge), so you can track how well your marketing efforts are working and calculate the return on your advertising investment (ROI).

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