Push it up!
Posted on April 8, 2009
Filed Under Strategy, Trends |
With the economic turndown still spinning around our heads, creativity is today the golden rule, even more than what it used to be. In order to avoid those catastrophic consequences the whole media is warning us about, businesses must now think twice before starting a sales campaign or launching a loyalty program.
Thus, here you have twelve (online) ways of increasing profitability and customer awareness in your multinational business.
- Outsource, partly or in full. As discussed in previous posts, outsourcing your dispensable tasks to a third party will help your company concentrate on relevant matters. Why would you spend weeks of your time implementing a fancy website if someone (or something) can do it for you in few hours?
- Focus! Differentiation is critical, yes, but a manager should never forget what is all about, pointing at few products and prospect customers instead of trying to grab the whole cake with one hand. You don’t want to be the next Nortel!
- Track all prospective customers in a web-based CRM. Never forget about the importance of (clean) organization. Get rid of those post-its on your desktop, throw away the dozens of business cards you have been gathering through the years and delete all unnecessary e-mails. In exchange, transfer all that information to an online CRM so that your peers –and you!- can access to it with a sole click. You can check this link if you need some advice about this type of application.
- Diversify revenue streams. As the dot-com crash taught us, multiple revenue streams are needed to mitigate a weakening market environment’s effect. Among the ways to diversify revenues are:
- Develop paid products for content offerings.
- Leverage consumer engagement on your site with third parties. This can be a straightforward paid arrangement, such as co-registration, or a less-obvious approach, like a shared sweep stakes.
- Create new opportunities. This can include utilizing email or postal mail lists, monetizing highly trafficked site areas, and inserting third-party pieces in packages sent to e-commerce customers.
- Improve branding. With the online market’s maturation, a more sophisticated approach to branding may be needed. This doesn’t necessarily mean you need a special branding budget. You may just coordinate the various components of your marketing mix to ensure they’re consistent and contribute to your overall image. Branding should be present everywhere your firm touches your customer, including your Web sites, email, and packages.
- Use analytics to drive your marketing. Set up your systems and processes to collect key performance metrics. Routinely assess your progress and modify your marketing tactics based on performance trends. You can easily start with, to mention but one, StatCounter.
- Get indexed in Google. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is in everyone’s mouths lately. By adapting your website in a way that can better appeal search engines the traffic to your company’s site will naturally increase without additional continued investments. You can check here and here in order to know more.
- Drive traffic using new methods. Consider whether every aspect of your marketing mix pulls its weight. For the coming months, you may add blogs, podcasts, and RSS feeds as a way of combating the overstuffed email box.
- Content, content and more content, in your website. The more you tell about your products, the bigger the interest from potential customers. Those serious prospects will be happy to get as much information as possible about your offering without having to contact you, especially for those whose purchase does not represent a neglectable part of a budget.
- Pay-per-Click Advertising or, in its most primitive form, Pay-per-View (PPV). Again, Google is the winner in terms of PPC. With their Google AdWords service one can see its traffic substantially increased by spending few Euro a day and without having a wide knowledge of the mechanisms running behind your corporate website.
- Extend consumer engagement. Though this engagement may take a variety of approaches, such as customer input solicitation and contests involving customer submissions, it must be relevant to your product, brand, and consumer segment. Consider how you will measure its effect on revenue generation.
While these are probably the most relevant ones, dozens of methods that will help your customers (current or future) get aware of your business and portfolio of products and services could be added to this list. At the end, your online resources are the reflection of a good organization and, both for internal and external visitors, should (and will!) be the first place of reference about your offer and capabilities.
Please, leave a comment with your opinion or other “customer generating” ideas.
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2 Responses to “Push it up!”
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Hi, good post. I have been wondering about this issue,so thanks for posting.
Very nice blog.