Poor Eddie
e-marketer has been plagued by errors in judgment all his life. From always picking longest line at toll booth to buying lots of dot com stocks right before bubble burst, he constantly struggles with making right choices. From disagreeing that a car really needs oil changes every three thousand miles to insisting that eight-track is going to make a comeback, Eddie bumbles through life perplexed. One area that particularly suffers is his e-marketing efforts.You see, Eddie recently got himself a new website for his business. Unfortunately, he’s been trying in vain to turn it into a vehicle for getting leads and making sales. He’s confused. He’s dazed. He thrashes about lost in a maze. Although he at least understands importance of e-marketing for driving traffic to his site, he’s like a hamster running on a wheel, wasting energy and getting nowhere. Let’s take a look at a few of more typical e-marketing errors Eddie regularly makes.
Treat Web as a different medium The other day his business partner, Betty, showed Eddie a recent half-page ad they ran in one of their industry’s magazines. Eddie, excited at how pretty pictures were, wanted it up on their website pronto. Did he alter it in any way before they posted it to site? Did he add a specific call to action hyperlink in it? Did he optimize large print graphics so they would download fast in people’s browsers? Nope. He just took ad, as is, and posted it. Eddie has never been able to grasp idea that traditional marketing and e-marketing, while related, are not same thing. What works in print doesn’t always work online. Why? Different mediums require different approaches. Look for Eddie’s static magazine ad in his first TV commercial, just motionless ad on screen for thirty seconds. Riveting.
The Web is interactive. Site visitors can click buttons, fill out forms, or post immediate comments in forums or blogs. When Eddie was having his site built, he really just wanted to have a way to talk about his business. He wanted to tell world how great his company was and exciting history of its formation. This is called brochure-ware. It’s just taking a company brochure, posting it online and adding a few links. To say that Eddie is underutilizing Web is like saying ocean is mildly wet. The Web is extremely powerful and businesses have a choice of taking advantage of its power, or just scratching surface with simple brochure-ware. It’s similar to buying a tank, climbing in and lifting hatch only to shoot spit balls at enemy. If you have that kind of power, use it.
Ask your customers what they want Since Eddie doesn’t really grasp interactive nature of Web he guesses what his potential customers want and need. One day in a meeting Eddie was scratching his head, staring up at ceiling and saying, “Gee, if there was only a way to figure out what our customers want, a way we could get in their heads, and a way to reach enough of them to get a really clear picture, hmm . . . ?” Thankfully, a timid but sharp junior associate raised her hand and suggested that they just ask their customers their opinions and needs directly, and do it online where they could ask a whole bunch of them.
Eddie jumped at idea. Finally he was going make right choice, albeit aided by a junior associate, but right e-marketing choice nonetheless. They created an html form with forty of most important questions he could think of and posted a link on their homepage called “Customer Survey”.
Offer incentives Only three people ever filled survey out, and that was it. Eddie was dumfounded. What went wrong? He was hoping for hundreds. The problem was that Web users are not patient and generally don’t like to fill out forms, especially long ones. Even more importantly, they don’t like to do something for nothing.
