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Small Business Marketing: Do You Have a Web Presence?

Topic: Managing Your Business,Marketing | Comments (1)

Posted on November 12, 2009 by admin

tony_pecora2Hi, I’m Tony Pecora, CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) here at WorkingPoint. As a long time marketing guy working with small sellers at eBay and having faced customer acquisition as a part of large and very small businesses myself, I wanted to share with you some of the things I have learned over time.

Starting with making sure you can be found on the Internet.

There are many things you can do to improve your ability to be found on the Internet, and I’ll address many of them over time, but the first order of business is to just make sure you are there. Nobody can find your business on the Web if you do not have a presence there.

According to Nielsen Online, a market research firm, 227.7 million Americans which is 74.1% of the total population of the United States have been using the Internet over 2009, most of them on a regular basis, many of them daily.

You can slice that total market number into very thin segments of potential customers who may be most relevant to your business and whom you may want to target, and the reality is that most of your target segment use the internet and are on it regularly.

Bottom Line – the Internet gives you access to a whole lot of potential customers with little effort and at a low cost.

I am surprised by how many small businesses have not yet decided to place a signpost – at least a simple company page – on the Internet. There are a number of ways to gain a simple presence. Most of them are very low cost compared to creating a signpost anywhere else.

  • On the small end of the spectrum, you can do something as simple as buy an online yellow pages posting for your business.
  • You can create a simple one-page Online Company Profile on WorkingPoint. Why not? It’s free. If you haven’t done this yet, click here to learn more.
  • You can go to a web site hosting company, and many of them offer templates you can use to develop your own simple web site.
  • You can hire a web developer to create a simple, template-based informational web site for you, typically for less than an thousand dollars.
  • You can decide to develop a fully customized small business web site typically for somewhere between $5,000 and $10,000.

My dad is a manufacturer’s representative that sells chemical processing equipment in Houston, Texas. He is 78 years old and has been doing that for 45 years. He has been running his own company for 30. I am proud of him because he is still going strong. Two months ago Dad decided to take the plunge and pay a developer to make a simple informational web site for him. If my 78 year old Dad can do it, you can too. Go Dad!!