If you are the owner of a small business and are looking for a way to build your business, Internet marketing may be the solution. If your business is in the tech area, such as selling website design or SEO services, this may be apparent. Less obvious would be if you owned a pipe company and were unaware that Internet marketing could help. On the most basic level, all business is the same, in that they try to sell a product to a customer. It could be a physical product or even a service, however the idea is still the same and customers can vary. Any type of company can benefit from Internet marketing in two ways: customer retention and customer creation.
Most businesses focus on customer creation and usually they are ineffective at best. The Field of Dreams theory of Internet marketing, if you build it they will come, does not work. Just because you build it does not mean they will come to you. In the good old days of the 1990’s you could have simply put up a plain website and may have received visitors. Those days are long gone. The amount of websites in contrast to people is huge and people’s attention is limited. Having a website alone is just not good enough.
If you are operating with a simple website then you really need to consider Internet marketing. You should be working on obtaining customers and building a relationship with them. Your main focus should be search engine optimization and building a website that will make people want to do business with you and then capture your customers email so that you can continue to sell to them in the future.This is the way that Internet marketing is used best and should be an important focus for your business. Customer retention is another area where Internet marketing could help your business. Customer retention is a key component to having a successful business. Keeping a customer is more cost effective than creating new customers.
An easy way to do that is to build your email list. The one of the most valuable assets that you could have is a list of previous customers who have bought from you.
This list is beneficial because you can send them important special offers, receive feedback and build customer loyalty for your business. A mailing list service is easy to use, fairly cheap and unexploited. There is a good chance that you may be the only one locally that uses this sort of technology and may give you a competitive advantage. By keeping your customers, your business will see success. No matter the type of business that you have, Internet marketing will allow you to obtain customers and keep them.
