There’s a lot of things to sell over the Web like products, services, and ideas. In essence, to sell these things, you got to have a good grounding on some marketing basics. Forget about SEOs and blogging tools for a minute and let’s get back to some old school marketing basics -which by my view still apply in the new Web.

Communicate

A large part of marketing is learning how to communicate with your target market. And with online selling, you have a vast array of media to your disposal. But before you decide which ones.

Here are some key points to take note in formulating a communication plan:

1. Product/Service
2. Target audience
3. Key messages

Knowing these are steps towards an outline for any media that you’d want to use.

Focus on your audience

There are basically three things that you have to make clear about the product or service that you are selling:

1. Features
2. Advantages
3. Benefits

Focus on your audience by hyping more on benefits.

AIDA

I was watching an older Al Pacino movie, Glengarry Glen Ross (actually a David Mamet play), which was about real estate selling. There was a part where Alec Baldwin’s character was lecturing the salesmen on A-I-D-A which is a mnemonic for:

1. Attention
2. Interest
3. Desire
4. Action

This pretty much outlines the steps towards closing a sale - 1) Get the audience’s attention. 2) Sustain their interest. 3) Build it as a desire. 4) Lead them to action (to buy).

Four Elements of Marketing Communication

Now you can reach out through various ways but what are referred to as elements of marketing communication are:

1. Advertising
2. Personal selling
3. Publicity
4. Promotion

Meaning you can have a lot of ways to get people into your site. Advertise via online ads. E-mail potential clients. Create a hype or buzz. Offer free/value added services. There’s a lot out there that can lead users to your site.

Building Preferrence

The end all and be all of marketing is not just to sell. It is to be a market leader. You just don’t want to sell once or twice. Like for websites, you just don’t want plenty of hits on one occasion, you’d want a sustained number of return visitors daily.

This pretty much means that you have to keep track of your audience’s wants. For websites, try to monitor user activity. Which pages the visit most. What topics get the most hits. Then adjust accordingly.

Keep in mind that you should also put premium on your service. Build a competitive advantage that everyone wants, that you can only provide. This is quite the challenge in the Web right now since it’s really hard to find unique content. But content isn’t everything. There’s a lot in your site that you could hype on that no other site can.

Source: Namibia Economist