OFF LINE MARKETING

When you are planning the marketing of your web site, do not forget
the opportunities to promote it off-line.

If you already have an off-line presence, ensure that your existing
customers and suppliers know you have a web site, and how it will
benefit them. e.g.. can they order direct from the site, find out
more details about your products, submit sales enquiries or service
problems. At the very least, include your web and e-mail addresses on
all of your stationery - letterheads, brochures, business cards and
advertisements.

If your site is designed to improve your sales or your customer
service, (and if it does not do either - preferably both - why have
you bothered to set up a site?), consider producing a small
leaflet/flyer announcing your site and its aims and send it out to
all of your customers and suppliers and insert it in all of your
outgoing mail.

Likewise, if your site is being run for a club or a society, ensure
that all members are aware of the url and email address - advertise
it in the club house or in the monthly newsletter.

For those of you whose business is solely on-line, there can still be
many opportunities for promoting yourself off-line. Dependant on your
target market (is it primarily local, or is it world-wide?) you can
try windscreen or bumper stickers for your car, getting some
compliment slips printed with your web site address on - perhaps a
copy of your sig. file - to place in all of your outgoing mail.
Remember, even the clerk who opens the envelope that contains your
cheque paying your quarterly utilities b

ill may be a potential
customer, or know someone who cold be interested in what you have to
offer.

Tell your relations, friends, neighbours, colleagues what you are
doing. Again, if they are not interested themselves, they may have
contacts who are. One word of warning however, do not become an
Internet bore.

When I was selling life insurance many years ago, a sales manager
said to me "Make friends of your customers, not customers of your
friends." Once your friends know what you do, allow them to approach
you when they are interested -that way you will, in the long run, get
more customers, without losing your friends!
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Tony Murtagh has spent all his career involved in sales, sales
management, marketing and PR. He was a UK National Sales Manager
(Major Accounts) for a mobile communications company, had his own
publishing company producing a monthly Business to Business magazine
and has acted as a PR consultant for a number of small businesses. He
is now sharing his wide experience of sales, marketing and promotion
in his new web site: -
http://DevelopYourWebSiteAndYourself.com
mailto://murtagh@DevelopYourWebSiteAndYourself.com
and in a weekly e-ezine Aardvark Marketing, which you can subscribe
to from the site, or
mailto:murtagh@...?subject=subscribe_ARTAN