Successfully Marketing Your Online Business In Southwest France

Successfully marketing your online Business in Southwest France

The key mistake I think small business Web Designers tend to make - and clients who are new to the Internet (or new even to running their own business in the first place) is to think that somehow this being something to do with "the internet" automatically showers the venture in pixie dust and that, actually, no general-sense marketing rules from the physical world apply. I see so many clients come to me with websites that are pretty brochures, but attract absolutely no business in their own right. The paradox with this being that in order for someone to find the website, they must either already know about that person - or have found their website via some 3rd party advertising means (either on paper or via another site).

The other problem that I tend to notice - and it is very difficult to broach to a client or their designer - is that by ignoring basic marketing research in the first place, they, er, don't actually have a business anyway. That is a hard message to give.

This can sometimes lead to internet marketing itself to be looked-on as the bogeyman (some sort of dark art), and not the absence of marketable concept or proper due diligence in the first place.

So let's leave "The Internet" to one side for the moment and pretend we're just creating a brand-new physical-world business.

Tip 1 for your online marketing strategy.
Basic due diligence in early marketing says "Look at your competition". (i.e. is there a market?). You have to understand a) whether there is competition (healthy) and what strategies they are taking to be where they are. Remeber that as soon as capacity is exposed in any market, people compete very aggressively to fill it up. So if you believe you genuinely "have something there" then awkward though it may feel, you have to look at what your competition is doing and determine as far as possible how they are doing it.

By knowing what your competition is doing, you will see how you can make yourself stand apart. I can only say from my own experience that looking at what my competition does has only ever served to sharpen my game, and I am sure (unfortunately!) that the same applies the other way. But this is entirely healthy and can only benefit the customer.

Tip 2 for your marketing strategy.
The next key determinant of a successful marketing plan is establishment of goals. When you decide to do any marketing campaign, you need to know what you want your end result will be. Incredible though it sounds, many people either do not think about this before starting out with marketing a product, or they set incredibly unrealistic goals that they could never realistically achieve - and leaving themselves improper funds to withstand a few failures and setbacks in the early days. (Though some sort of goal is better than none - at least you have a benchmark to adjust against later). So what are the realistic results you would like to receive from your Internet Business? Do you want to increase traffic to your website?
Do you want to sell x units of such and such a product? Do you know what your break-even position is - or even your walk-away position? Do you want your name to become recognized (i.e. build brand-awareness before a product release in a couple of months? Each of these three is a different focus and knowing what you want to aim for will make a difference to the way you set about your marketing campaign.

Tip 3 for your marketing strategy.
Having determined what your competition is doing and what your goals are then unlocks your marketing strategy. (How are you going to do what you need to do to get what you want). Marketing strategy has to focus on several fronts. To get traffic to focus upon a product or service, you have to position as much as you can behind the scenes so that when you 'go live' with the product or service (i.e. when you tell the world you are there), you are already in a fairly unassailable position at least for a short time. So you will need to have your product and service ready; have an understanding of what your competition is doing and how you can be different from them (or just do things better) and you need an idea of the goals by which you can judge whether things are a success or not.

You have to have available a ready supply of hard-copy product information for distribution to your client base as well as all the online copy that backs this up. Absolutely key is that you ensure your wording and key phrases used in all your communications are ligned-up and that if possible you can seed key phrases into your advertising that become peoples' search criteria for you in the future. A short article cannot give you a cookery book of marketing strategy tips - although with the resources available from Google, Amazon and Clickbank on this page, I have made your starting point a bit easier. Then come and talk to me and seek advice. Marketing strategy comes down to deciding what you want to do to make yourself unique, and how to get it done.

Tip 4 for your marketing strategy.
The final tip about internet marketing - which again is no different from marketing in the physical world is - assume the client will neve find you. Use all possible sources of information to compile a list of targeted prospects who you can market to. This can be done in many different ways (again talk to us). Who do you think will want your product and how will you sell to them? On the internet your online budget is fortunately traceable down to the click! Using Adwords even to dip your toe into your market (without full-blown expensive campaign) you can see exactly what word combinations bring people to your site, and even whether your site is then rewarding them with what they want. For the cost of a couple of hundred euros for a week or two's adwords campaign that you constantly monitor you get a lot of really useful information about what works in your market and what doesn't; approximately how many people it takes to visit your site before you get a sale etc. Alternatively you can take out online and paper advertisements using the higher 'popularity' of the other site (or newspaper) to drive curious customers to your site. Or you can advertise on ezines that your targeted prospects read. You could work with other websites to profile your product as well. The beauty of the Internet is that you have an unlimited number of resources that you could use to help you in launching your marketing campaign.

Hopefully this article on Successfully marketing your online business in Southwest France has given you some insights. Whenever you are looking at starting a new marketing campaign, you need to see what is being done out there in the marketplace and how this is stacking up sales-wise for your competition. You will then want to decide upon the focus of your own marketing campaign and set your own targets to measure success. And then you have to get out there; see what's working and what isn't and adjust, adjust, adjust.

You will have put yourself in a great position by going through these exploratory steps before deciding how to approach your marketing campaign and the crazy truth is - so few people don't! They don't even know they don't have a business! Proper strategic planning (and reliable advice) can allow you to improve on what is working and develop a niche within any given market. Remember it is not always the market least served that is your opportunity - but the market you can BEST serve.

About the Author: Richard Martin of Briquesetclics is a Certified Management Consultant and Accredited Internet Marketing Consultant of 20 years experience in IT. Briquesetclics offers exquisite eBusiness solutions, website design and Internet Marketing with English to French Translation to expat and French Comunities in Southwest France. He serves the Limousin, Poitou-Charentes and Aquitaine regions and the cities of Limoges, Poitiers, Bergerac, Perigueux, Angouleme, Cognac, Bordeaux, Niort.

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