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Advertising and promoting your site is as important as a good design. Sometimes even more important than the design. With millions of websites on the Internet your site can easily disappear in the electronic jungle called "cyber-highway".
A few years back it wasn't as important to advertise on the Internet. Because of the small amount of websites anybody was able to find your home page by typing in a few keywords in one of the major search engines. Today, when you type in certain words you search results will return to you sometimes in the thousands. To successfully promote site you need a good Marketing and Promotions Plan. ADS can develop a plan to meet your needs.
Please complete the contact form located at the bottom of this page to request a FREE consultation.
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When considering a marketing plan, for the past 40 years almost every plan starts with the E. Jerome McCarthy’s four "Ps of Marketing".
Product |
Individual goods, product lines, or services |
Includes features, accessories, installation, instructions, service, warranty, packaging, and brand names. |
Place
(Distribution) |
Getting the product to the customer. |
Channels, distribution systems, middlemen, warehousing, transportation, fulfillment, and shipping. |
Promotion |
Communicating with the customer |
Personal selling, mass selling, sales promotion, sales personnel, advertising, media selection, copywriting. |
Price
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Setting a price that serves the customer well and maximizes profits to the company. |
Price flexibility, level pricing, introductory pricing, discounts, allowances, geographic terms. |
While this plan was created long before the Internet, its foundation still applies well to the web. The Internet Marketing Plan takes considerable pains to understand and characterize the market, the customer, and the environment in which you are doing business. The 4 Ps is a different part of the Plan. One way to look at this is uncontrollable factors vs. controllable factors:
Uncontrollable -- The current economic environment includes elements such as consumer confidence, degree of unemployment, new technologies that threaten to displace, competitors that suddenly appear on the horizon, government regulations thought up by your favorite legislator, and changing consumer preferences.
Controllable -- The 4 Ps represent elements of the marketing strategy that we can control. They depend upon such "givens" as your budget, personnel, creativity, etc.
When Advanced Development Solutions creates a Custom Internet Marketing and Promotion Plan, we include a section for each of the 4 Ps that define the marketing program. These are the four major ingredients of a traditional marketing mix directed at the customer or target market. Please complete the contact form located at the bottom of this page to request a FREE consultation.
Some of the areas we will target in our marketing plan are:
- Client Controllable Content
- Press Releases
- Search Engine and Directory registration
- Banner Advertising
- Affiliate or Associate Programs
- Public Relations
- Traditional Media (mail, flyers, telemarketing)
- Networking
- Paid Advertising (radio, TV, Newspaper, etc.)
The first item in the list, "client controllable content", could be the key element to attracting new users and retaining them. The following passage was taken from Dr. Ralph F. Wilson, "Developing an Effective Internet Promotional Mix" which outlines this point:
What Your Website Tells Your Visitors
First of all, until your website is in good shape, you can spend a lot of money bringing traffic to your site, but you won't do much business. Have you ever seen a store on a street in your town where the owner decided he could skip paying a professional sign maker, and paint the sign himself? When he's finished, he's really impressed with what he's been able to accomplish with his limited experience. He brings his wife over.
"Great sign, right, dear?"
"Remarkable, Henry," she comments.
He shows it to his brother-in-law and best friend. And he's so excited about it that they don't want to burst his bubble by telling him the truth: "Henry, it may be a real accomplishment for you, but it looks cheap and homemade. It won't grow your business. In fact, it will deter customers from coming in your store."
Ad agencies have complained to me that companies are spending tens of thousands of dollars in banner advertising, but their websites turn people off when the advertising succeeds in getting them to the site. One of the first steps in your site promotion strategy is to get your website ready to sell effectively. It'll never be perfect, it'll always be a work in progress, but it needs to look very good.
If your business or organization has a site, but it's just not getting the action you had hoped for, we can help. ADS will perform a site assessment and add design elements and interactivity to bring your page up-to-date and make it an attention getter on the web.
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Custom Marketiing and Promotions Contact Form:
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