Q: Do you think websites are an effective way of marketing products?

A: Absolutely. Creating a website is one of the best marketing tools for any small business with a product or service. There are several reasons why you should entertain a website for your small business right away:

1) The Telephone Book argument. Several demographics are naturally shifting to the web for the solution to their problem. So instead of looking through telephone books for landscaping or plumbing services, keywords are now searched online. You want to work with a marketing company familiar with search engine marketing to optimize your placement within the search engines. Feeding into the telephone book argument is the use of Google AdWords and other PPC platforms that enable you to bid for higher advertisement placement within search engines. With several demographics abandoning the telephone book for search engines, having a website is a must.

2) Enhance your marketing distribution vehicles. With a website, you now have a much broader market. Let’s say you have a very niche product such as organic parrot food and you are a small business in Portland, Oregon. Without a website, you really can only serve the Portland metro area; but an eCommerce website for your products will allow you to expand your market to throughout the U.S and maybe even the world. Yes, mail order catalogs enable you to sell your product to the world as well, but this involves customer service costs; discussed below:

3) Lower administrative, sales and customer service costs. With a website, you can showcase your business hours, products and even a map to your location. Showcasing all of this will result in fewer time consuming informational calls. With an eCommerce site, your website platform will act on behalf of customer service staff and take orders from your customers. In fact, your eCommerce site is running 24 hours a day; allowing for order placement when your customer service staff is off. You’ll save money with your sales staff as well; your website will better educate and qualify leads on your product and service.

4) Turn prospects into warm leads. Even with Google Analytics you still are rather blind as to who is visiting your site. Utilize your website to drive visitors to call you or at least join your monthly or quarterly newsletter. Customer and prospect relationship management is the best way to convert prospects to customers, increase sale frequency and sales volume. The only way you can include prospects into a relationship campaign is if you somehow capture their contact information; online works very well for this.

Q: We are launching our new restaurant next week, how do you recommend we market to our neighborhood?

A: Direct mail menus. Direct mail is an effective way to reach a highly targeted audience (your local neighborhood) in an affordable, unobtrusive manner. Place your delicious menu on a direct mail postcard, acquire a mailing list fitting the geography and even income level of your audience; the end result is a targeted message that is sure to land on your prospect’s refrigerator.

Door hangers will work as well, however keep in mind the odd size of door hangers; it is unlikely that your prospects will place this item on the refrigerator or keep around for a long period of time.

Introducing Sprite Marketing’s Small Business Q & A and General Blog

Hello World! With Sprite Marketing’s goal to provide business owners with straight-forward marketing advice, interesting articles and tips, we have expanded the original Sprite Marketing Q & A section into this fantastic new blog.

With this blog, we will host relevant marketing and advertising articles written by Sprite Marketing, link to other well-written articles, comment about the marketing world and provide insight to business owners with our free, Ask a Marketing Question feature. Yes, this feature is truly free, with no-strings attached. If your question is general enough and relevant, Sprite Marketing will post the question (anonymously of course) on this blog for other small businesses to gain. We’ll kick off this blog by migrating over the very best small business marketing questions from their prior location.

Are you in need of marketing advice?

Thank you and welcome!