Market yourself - online
Create an effective online marketing strategy
By Leah Macpherson
Looking for a less expensive, more effective way to market and grow your business? Then it’s time to develop an Internet presence and create a strategy to market yourself online.
Relationship coaches Paul and Layne Cutright were burnt out after 20 years of giving live seminars and travelling extensively. Looking for a more effective way to grow their business, they looked to the Internet to market themselves.
“The year we launched our web site our business tripled. Then we added live video and podcasts and our business doubled again; now we’re working to develop more of a social networking presence,” says Paul.
IN THIS STORY
Smart spending
David Delage, senior project and web marketing manager with Marketing Breakthroughs Inc., says that marketing yourself online can be less expensive than traditional marketing strategies and can yield far greater results.
“In today’s web-centric world, people don’t use the classifieds or yellow pages to find goods and services; they look online,” he says. According to Delage, online marketing can provide the following benefits:
- a lower-cost structure
- increased reach into new markets
- more accurate sales forecasts and tracking
Tools of online trade
“If you don’t have an online presence, you’re missing out on a huge market,” says Tawnya Sutherland, Internet marketing specialist and owner of MediaMAGE. Sutherland and Delage agree that the key to online marketing is a comprehensive, multi-pronged web strategy.
“By expanding and extending your online presence, you can draw people to your site in a number of different ways,” notes Delage.
These cybertools are the foundation of a solid online marketing plan:
Web site. A portal of sales and communication between you and prospective clients, a web site should be
- cleanly designed
- simple to navigate
- filled with quick snippets of easily digestible information about your services
“A web site should also have a variety of calls to action — meaning ways for you to gather information about potential clients — like a newsletter subscription option or a ‘Buy Now’ button,” Sutherland points out.
Resume. Have a link to your resume on your web site. Be sure it’s in a format that can be opened by both PC and Mac users, such as a PDF or a printable format in HTML, Sutherland suggests.
Newsletter. Sending out a newsletter can be an effective method of staying top-of-mind with customers. Information should be interesting to clients so they don’t consign it to the spam file or think it annoying or irrelevant. So consider the content carefully.
Social networking. According to the pollsters at Ipsos Reid, nearly one in three Canadians has posted a profile on a social network. The trend is expected to grow rapidly. “The bigger your online presence, the higher you’ll rank in the search engines,” points out Sutherland. She recommends clients belong to at least 10 social networks, such as MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, to score higher ranking on search engines and reach more potential clients.
Video/audio. Interactivity is enormously important — you’ve only got a few seconds to grab the attention of visitors to your site. “For video, a low-cost option would be posting your video to YouTube and providing a link,” says Sutherland. Otherwise, she suggests easy-to-use video streaming services, such as Instant Video Generator or Vidego. Podcasts can be quickly and simply added to a site with services such as Audio Acrobat and Sonic Memo.
The next big thing
Delage believes that advertising on cell phones and smartphones is the brave new frontier of online advertising. “I think online marketers are going to start targeting these users with compelling little bits of ‘drive-through’ information.” Eventually, people marketing themselves may be able to send out tasty morsels of mobile marketing information right to their customers’ cell phones.
“The Internet has been a powerful marketing tool for us,” says Paul Cutright. “I don’t think we could have reached this level of success through traditional marketing methods.”
