“Fantastic!”, I thought when our small company launched its first web site in 1996 (otherwise known as 2 BG – 2 years before Google). I immediately grasped the awesome possibilities and saw the future of this powerful new medium - “I won’t have to hand out so many brochures!”
If you choose to use your web site as a surrogate brochure or calling card, that's fantastic. But, it is like using the roads for a donkey cart instead of a tractor-trailer. A donkey cart can carry a lot, but a tractor-trailer uses the same roadway to do so much more.
As each new medium comes along, its content has a tendency to imitate the content of the media that came before. Until we realized its power to entertain, radio programming was a rehash newspaper copy. The first television stars were old radio personalities; doing what they did on radio, but in front of the cameras.
The same is true for the internet. Even the old “information superhighway” name probably originated in reference to the idea that the web could convey any print, audio or video content, but it does not reflect what the internet has become.
Like the media that preceded it, the internet has matured and forged its own identity by connecting all of us in ways that other media cannot. Not just single lanes of traffic, like a highway, but multiple communication pathways, going in every direction – like a living organism.
When you use your web site only as a surrogate brochure, you are not taking advantage of the internet’s ability to connect. Connect to your markets, connect to your customers, connect to your competition.
Internet marketing offers the opportunity to connect along those multiple pathways – whether your customers are “kicking tires”, or ready to buy; whether they need lots of info or they purchase on impulse and whether they are looking for the purple widget or green thingme.
When you connect with your potential customers on new levels that relate directly to their buying process, you increase the chance of converting them to paying customers.
With the right internet marketing, you can turn your web site into your leading source of business and business leads. Just the economic stimulus package your company might need.
By Stephen Da Cambra
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