Small Business Online Marketing & Sales

From the perspective of a small business who provides mail-order products, such as RS Motorbike Paint, here's an example strategy to create an online marketing and sales capability. Adding together the various options available, here's an example strategy. I think it makes sense to go for minimal upfront investment, and operational costs - both in time and money. The ability to measure the effectiveness of the online channel is also important, as is the option to incrementally increase investment in the channel if the stats tell you that the investment is worth it.

Step One: Visibility

The first step to an online presence is a professional website with a strong brand image and well structured information. This includes a domain name "yourbusinessname.com" and email addresses "orders@yourbusinessname.com" etc. To begin with, the key purpose of the website will be to give the customer the assurance that you are the business that they want to deal with, and guide them to your phone channel. The key to utilising both the phone and online channels properly is to ensure that both the phones and emails are well manned, with well defined processes run off the back of them to agreed SLAs. This will give your customers rapid feedback and confidence that the online channel is being well managed. Online customer experience and customer service is as important as offline.

Add your domain name/url to all your business cards, letter heads, company vehicles etc.

Search-engine optimisation is very important at this stage to allow your customers to find you via Google.

You need to have statistics available from your website service provider so that you can see, at a minimum, how many people have visited your site. Being able to understand the proportion of people who make contact is a key statistic.

Also, adding your company to yell.com and linking this entry to the website is a very useful way to channel customers to your website.

Step Two: Online Marketing

The easiest way into online marketing is via Google AdWords and AdSense, paying per-click. It might make sense to put together some simple ad banners, but this is not necessary with Google, which primarily operates on a text-advertising basis.

Identify key websites that have a large user-base primarily made up of your target demographic and see how you can get your links and marketing onto their site. Keep these to a minimum as they probably cost more and take more management effort.

Step Three: Online Sales

Create yourself as a business on ebay and list your major products there. Its probably worth making the jump to an ebay store at this point to ease management effort, provide a consistent set of product offerings, a single url to link to, and a more consistent online brand image.

Link to this prominantly from your Step One "Marketing" website wherever the customer may want to buy immediately. Also, take advantage of the various tools provided by ebay to manage and monitor your online store, plus take advantage of the access you have to ebay's user-base through optimising the keywords you use to describe products, and also cross-marketing with other stores.