Have we all gone mad

PR Smith Thought For the Month

Have we all gone mad with spiders, virals and blogs?

Spiders, Virals and Bloggs. Web logs, Web rings and infomediaries. Opt-in, Opt-out. SEO, SEM. PPC, P2P. RSS, SMS and MMS; Podcasting, push media and portals; media convergence and fragmentation. Have we all gone mad? Or can these new eMarketing tools really help marketers to reach new customers, satisfy existing ones in new and better ways and ultimately, grow sales and profits? The answer is yes. eMarketing allows marketers to get closer to customers, listen to them, satisfy them in new and different ways. New, relevant, high value, yet often, low cost ways that simply delight customers and bring them back again and again.

Your Market is Migrating. All markets are migrating online. Some completely and some only partially. Some faster than others. Some customer segments browse online and buy offline. Others, browse and buy online. Customers expect you to have an online presence. Even if it’s only 5% of your customers migrating online, this is significant. For some companies the last 5 - 10% of customers can represent the difference between profit and loss. As markets migrate your market expands across borders. There are customers overseas who would be delighted to find your brand's benefits when they shop online. How much attention (and resources) are you giving your growing online market? You cannot ignore it or leave it to just one or two other people to sort out, your whole sales and marketing team needs to think integrated marketing i.e. traditional marketing totally integrated with eMarketing techniques. See workshops for more. The good news is that an awful lot of organisations are absolutely dreadful at eMarketing, in fact they are damaging their brands, losing customers and bigger online markets as they ignore the basic principles of good eMarketing. So before your customers, and potential online customers, consolidate their chosen few online sites, there is a great opportunity to get it right and create a long lasting online competitive advantage to boost sales and profits.

Coming Soon............. ‘Virtual Migration’ where today’s eMarketers must meet the reality of the Matrix Movie…..

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