In each issue, an expert answers a business question submitted by a Board of Trade member.  We invite you to submit your questions on any subject to the following address: 7000experts@ccmm.qc.ca.

Question: How does the Web fit into my marketing strategy?

More and more people are using the Internet to find products and services. Whether or not you sell online, this medium should figure prominently in your marketing strategy. While opportunities abound, so do the types of approaches to marketing. The following four steps are essential to success:

Analyze your assets
Succeeding online does not necessarily mean reinventing yourself from A to Z. Your marketing strategy will reflect your assets and competitive advantages. Consequently, you must analyze your position (strengths / weaknesses / business opportunities / threats) to determine how to best market your product.

Build your strategy
Once you have defined your assets and strengths, you will be able to develop an action plan and determine the best tactics to use. For instance, if your company produces studies, articles or capsules in your industry, you would do well to start a blog or join forums related to your line of business. If your strategy is to sell at the lowest price and you are highly competitive, you should list your products on price comparison sites such as www.shopping.com.

Use performance indicators
One of the best things about the Internet is that it allows you to accurately measure the effectiveness of your marketing approach. This medium provides extremely pertinent information for every type of business. Online retailers will surely want to look at their return on investment, while service firms will be interested in finding out which sources drive higher-end traffic to their site. This step is crucial since each company will require a different set of performance indicators, and there is no one winning formula.

Regularly re-evaluate your investment
Imagine using a strategy that costs $10,000 but only generates $5,000 of sales, while another costs $2,000 but returns $50,000. In which one would you invest your next marketing budget? The answer is clear, yet many businesses do not re-evaluate their budget during the year and as a result, miss excellent opportunities by investing in tactics that return very little in the way of profits.

In addition to these guidelines, the following two approaches should definitely be considered when building your marketing strategy. 

Search engines
Google and the other major search engines are in reality your site's home page. People looking for your products or services are more than likely to use any one of these tools. If your site is not indexed by these search engines, you are missing a huge number of potential customers. Whether it's by optimizing your site to appear in the organic results or by paying to guarantee your ranking, you must have the right keywords to improve your search engine positioning. 

Social networks
Blogs, forums, Facebook and YouTube are a treasure trove of information on what your potential customers are looking for and on what they expect from a product/service.  These sources provide perpetual real-time data without the cost of a traditional market study. You may very well end up changing your strategy once you read what these Internet users have to say about you. Try it. Type your company name or the main keyword related to your offer in Google and see what comes up. You may be in for a surprise.

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