► Sales channel development - a winning channel strategy is hallmark of any successful business. Successful companies pay acute attention to their customer needs by identifying, motivating and rewarding a sales channel that works hard on customer relationships. These companies recognize that a multiple channels-to-market sales strategy provides best coverage and drives market leadership.

► Offer a unique selling position - finding a unique selling proposition (USP) is job one within companies that are constantly successful. These companies enunciate, focus and bang away at their unique selling proposition and ultimately gain market share, keep customer confusion to a minimum, and frighten their direct competitors. These companies rarely bring a me-too product or service to market. They utilize leading-edge technology and innovative ideas to pressure market competition while providing unparalleled value to their customers.

► First-hand competitive knowledge - successful firms know and understand strengths as well as weak areas of their direct competitors. They constantly seek competitive intelligence and apply it to their on-going marketing and sales tactics.

► Maximum enterprise agility and flexibility - successful firms recognize that change is inevitable. Developing right ‘muscles' within an organization to allow a large degree of flexibility is essential in today's fiercely competitive landscape. Firms with vision to understand that it does no good for a business to recognize a change, while not having agility to respond, will always retain best opportunity to gain significant market share and experience enviable leadership.

Audit your organization. How many of above points is not only apparent, but at hard work within your company? How successful do you want to be? Think about it.

Use your eNewsletter to inform your customer base and potential clients about new products, or services. Selectively discuss significant corporate events but only to extent it reinforces customers' decision to work with your firm. Gratuitous self-promotion is meaningless. Certain promotions and value adding programs that benefit customer should be routinely included. The frequency of your eNewsletter depends on your target audience. Weekly or bi-weekly seems to strike a good balance between too little and too much. However, decision should be driven by how often you have enough important ‘news'. Global Marketing has seen daily eNewsletters that retain importance to customer.

► Other important e-marketing tools and considerations e-Marketing has two basic responsibilities once web site is built --to create compelling content and increase traffic to web site. All in an effort to uncover sales opportunities.

There are a variety of tools to drive up traffic. Earlier in this article, Global Marketing mentioned meta tags in relation to web site development. Meta tags are used by search engines such as Goggle, Altavista, etc. to quickly scan and return most relevant web sites based on words or a group of words entered into search field. This article won't cover all aspects of meta tags, suffice to say that meta tags should be incorporated into heading of each page as well as title page of your web site. The selection of these words is critical. Meta tags should be words that reflect what you do, and be descriptive of your products or services.

The importance of picking right words and phrases plays out when search engine returns numerous web sites - say 30,000. Meta tags is part of process by which web sites are ranked against criteria you put into search field. And there is a variety of programming tricks that will raise your web site's ranking. With literally millions of web sites available on Internet, Marketing's goal should be to get ranked in top 25 for words and phrases that are important to your mission, product or service. This brings visitors that seek what you offer - an initial qualifying process. Global Marketing's experience can be of vital help in this area.

e-Marketing works for a variety of reasons. However, many of same basic marketing principles applies. You need to understand your customer, and serve them faster and more compelling than your competitors. Building a database of customers in your target market is key. In e-Marketing you are looking for e-mail addresses rather than mailing addresses. When you first start your e-presence, you need e-mail addresses. Lots and lots of e-mail addresses. Now would be time to buy a ready-made list. You may also decide to use various pieces of software that captures e-mail addresses on Internet. E-mail lists are plentiful and available for select markets, and can be sliced and diced to meet your particular needs. Typical costs will range from $0.10 to $0.50 per e-mail address depending on quality and source of list. Or you may decide to use any of a number of inexpensive software programs that will trowel-the-net capturing literally 100's of thousands of new e-mail address per hour. You may get quantity, but quality can be poor and is unqualified.

Proper use of e-mail addresses will help to increase you web site traffic. However, company still has a burden to make content of web site compelling to visitor. By keeping web site fresh, with high content, visitor will return. Your web site can be beginning of a customer qualifying process. As a pivotal customer support tool, your web can provide access to information customers need while saving them a phone call and allowing them access time on their terms. Done correctly, e-marketing provides a very sustainable competitive advantage.

How effective is your web site will be something you want to know? You'll want to know if your content is compelling and does it drive up traffic. You'll want to know what pages are accessed and how many times. If you run a special, you'll want to know if visitors read about it. Traffic statistics can be a powerful monitoring tool to assist marketing group to adjust web content , ensuring maximum visitors. Software programs are available that do a wonderful job of reporting and slicing and dicing data to how it best fits your needs. Most servers will also provide limited data and reports on traffic.

Depending on your target market, you must decide what content provides your target market most value. These include decisions on what is available for free and what requires payment. Payment can take form of asking for an e-mail address to actually accepting credit cards. Typical web site content may include product or service data sheets, applications notes and/or certain downloadable software giving 24 hour, 7 day-a-week access. This convenience clearly makes it easier for customers to do business with you and that's a plus. You may also direct clients to other web sites that offer resources that compliment your products. There is a host of ways to use your web site to enhance your competitive position, while qualifying and informing your target market.

Establishing an e-presence is a marketing imperative in today's global market. Global Marketing can provide ideas on content and additional ways to drive up traffic to your web site. Call today!