Posts tagged as:

small business online marketing strategy

When does marketing become sales? (Guide to Small Business Ecommerce Strategy)

by Tim on June 10, 2008

in E-commerce

One of the more interesting observations in Josh Catone’s Read/Write Web discussion of “6 Ways to Sell Your Stuff Online” is how effortlessly he switches between sales channels (Etsy, self-hosted storefront) and marketing channels (classifieds, social networks). The internet, more than any medium that preceded it, has blurred those distinctions dramatically. Take a look at this:

is-it-distribution-or-marketing.png

You’ve got paid search, natural search, images, prices, customer reviews, customer ratings, meta-search, copy and maps all on one page. This isn’t some beta product. This is real. This is right now. And it’s not limited to travel:

google-marketing-distribution.png

As we’ve noted here before, you need to understand the right sales and marketing channels for your product. Yesterday, I talked about using a social tool, Twitter, to find a customer and lead to a sale. We’ve even looked at search engines as a distribution channel. Each of these channels has a cost, some of which you can track directly back to the sale and some of which are harder to measure. But – especially in small business – if you’re responsible for marketing and think sales isn’t your job, you’re not doing your job. And vice versa.

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Collecting your competitive data (Guide to Small Business Ecommerce Strategy)

by Tim on May 20, 2008

in E-commerce

ecommerce strategy image courtesy of pshutterbug on FlickrLast week we took a look at how to conduct competitive and market research to develop your ecommerce and online marketing strategy. A strong visual layout of that competitive information will help you as you develop your online strategy.

One technique I find useful is to create a grid that shows how each competitor – and your company – rate in various strategic areas. For instance, it’s helpful to rate each company according to the 4 “P’s” of markting – its online product offering, its distribution strategy (also known as place or sales channels), the price and price strategy offered, and how each promotes itself. I prefer using a 4-point scale ranging from +2 to -2 (ignore 0). A “+2 rating” indicates the competitor does a great job, while a “-2″ says they don’t offer it – or do it so poorly they’d be better off if they didn’t at all. The middle values account degrees of success or failure. For example, comparing yourself with two competitors, you might end up with a grid that looks like this:

Competitor A Competitor B Self
Product +1 -1 +1
Place +2 +1 -1
Price -1 +2 +2
Promotion -2 +2 -1

Obviously, you’d likely have multiple rows for each “P” to account for any differences. For instance, when reviewing product, do your competitors offer all their products or only some? Do they monetize their traffic using ads or affiliate marketing? Does their distribution strategy only include their own website? A mobile site? Use third-party distribution, such as Craigslist, Ebay, Amazon, Expedia? Affiliate sites? For price, do they offer price parity across all channels or do they offer price preference for one?

Clearly, you’ll see overlap between your online strategy and your overall business strategy. That’s a Good Thing. It’s when they don’t overlap that you should worry.

Once you’ve gotten these items placed into a grid, it should be easy to identify where you compete head-to-head and where there are gaps in the marketplace. Next time, we’ll take a look at how to exploit those gaps to develop an online strategy that’s second to none.

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