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Crush the Competition
An Internet Sales and Marketing Strategy for Small Business
 By James A. Ziegler

Grow or die! Make up your mind right now! Which way is it going to be? If you
seriously intend for your business to survive and prosper in this turbulent economic environment, you'd better be prepared for a fight. Like it or not, it's a dog-eat-dog
world. If you're going to get your share of the business, you're going to have to take customers away from someone else who already has them. And, remember this, the competition is relentlessly looking for new ways to take your business away from you.

  Why is it so many small business people focus all of their advertising on looking for
new business when your present and past customers are your best and cheapest
source of future business? The options should be obvious, manage your customer relationships or you will lose them.  There just isn't an overabundance of loyal
customers out there. The public is fickle and trends, tastes, fashions and fads can all change overnight. In the restaurant and bar business there is an old saying that strikes
fear in every owner's heart..."The Crowd Moved On".

  With so much cheap off-the-shelf technology available there's no excuse for any
business not to maintain a customer database.  Sadly, most small businesses don't
have any re-contact or profile information on your customers. The key to growth in
any business is to hang onto to your old customers while developing relationships
with more new customers. I have an original saying I often repeat in my seminars,
"The most powerful people on earth are those people who influence the most other people."

Even if your products and customer service are excellent, that alone is not good
enough to keep customers coming back. The public has a short memory and little
real appreciation for what you've done for them in the past.  You've got to keep
new offers and services in front of them. Relationship-based marketing is all about
the frequency of repeated positive impressions. It's about staying on their mind.

  My best strategy is a blend of traditional advertising, direct mail, web-based
marketing and email marketing. The Internet changed all of the rules and now those
rules are changing again. The pendulum is swinging in another direction. You might say..."The Internet Crowd Moved On". The public is becoming increasingly wary of doing business with pure web-based cyber businesses that have no foundation in the physical world. People are becoming skeptical, certainly more cautious about whipping out a credit card for some phantom business that's little more than a ghost.

This year we've seen some of the biggest dot-coms crash and burn while mall parking
lots were filled to overflowing. Traditional retailers are kicking back. Evidence is increasingly suggesting that the public trusts a traditional company with real bricks and mortar. They want to do business with someone they've heard of before, a place you
can actually see and visit, with real people you can actually speak to on the telephone. The winners in this war will be the traditional bricks and mortar businesses with an established solid reputation that also have a strong web presence.

  Now is when the established businesses should be exploding onto the Internet. You've got to get into e-commerce right now. I'm talking about business-to-business applications as well as retail businesses and service businesses. A good website can turn a small, neighborhood family-owned business into an international marketing juggernaut. If you think your company is too small to have a website, you're absolutely right. In fact, if you don't have a website, I predict you'll become increasing smaller until you hit the vanishing point and disappear.

  The Internet is not going to go away and e-commerce is not dead, it is only taking a breather while it reinvents itself. Your business must have a fully functional, interactive, multi-media website with the ability to conduct business online. Think of the Internet,
not as the message itself but rather as a low cost expansion of the advertising message. Every ad, every commercial, every mailer directs your customers back to your
web site(s) for more information. A small ad in the paper can direct the customer to
five full page ads on your website. A website becomes the hub, the center of your marketing strategy. Change your website often. Tear it down and rebuild it frequently. Change the way it looks every time. Give the customer reason to return frequently to
see new things.

Once a prospect visits your business website, there's got to be some device to register them into your follow-up database. The most powerful form of business-to-customer communication and advertising today is the subscriber email newsletter. Currently,
nearly 100 million American households have multiple email addresses. In my speeches and seminars I am advising businesses of all types to sign up and subscribe every current and past customer as well as future prospects to an email "opt-in" newsletter. They sign up for the newsletter at the business location or they can register on every page of your website. The application has a release giving you permission to send your message and every newsletter has a conspicuous way for them to unsubscribe. The email newsletter itself has several stories and articles in it maybe even a recipe or a travel tip...it's personal and warm as well as educational or valuable. It alerts the customer to new products and rebates and maybe even recalls. It is the one of the main vehicles for keeping up the continuing relationship with the customer.

As a businessman (woman) the email newsletter is the perfect selling machine. There
are special offers, coupons and sales offered throughout the newsletter with active blue "hyperlinks" which take the customers directly to pages on the website where these specials are offered. If you sell products, your website must have the ability to sell a product right now and process the credit card order online when they are in the buying mood, while they are still online. The money is in the bank nearly at the speed of light.

The beauty of the free email newsletter is when you ask your customers "Please
forward this newsletter on to three of your friends." My own companies' email
newsletters are growing exponentially larger all by themselves at the rate of several hundred new addresses monthly. The number of subscribers is mushrooming just
because my current subscribers like the articles in the email newsletters and forward
them on to friends who also sign up for the email newsletter and so on. The idea is to expand the number of quality impressions in a friendly environment that is also conducive to sales.

It's a war out there...a war for the hearts and minds of your customers. Relationship based marketing on a large scale demands organization and the technology to manage information. Fortunately, the playing field is level and the technology is easy to use and inexpensive. A small business with its agility, ingenuity and entrepreneurial spirit can bring giant corporations to their knees. Never in history has the little guy (gal) had such a distinct advantage.



James A. Ziegler is president of Ziegler Dynamics, Inc.   He is an accomplished, nationally recognized professional speaker and is the author of  The Prosperity Equation: The Entrepreneur's Road Map to Wealth (Peach State Press)  Jim helps people and businesses to leverage relationships into increased sales and profits. http://www.ZieglerDynamics.com    (800) 726-0510  
                                                          ExpertMagazine.com 2001

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