Avoid Joining Dot-Com Road kill

By Lee Traupel

Can you name one dot-com company that paid millions of dollars or euros for these brand awareness ads?

This marketing is right out of the frenzied-drunken-sailor school of budgeting.

Using it, companies spend like a drunken sailor hitting his first port of call in years, with no thought other than brand awareness.

Got the picture yet? Want the Cliffs notes to the rest of my article? It's "target customers online."

Here are some dos and don'ts to remember:

Think digital marketing. Use keywords throughout your online and off-line marketing that your customers might punch in to a search engine. This forces you to stay focused on your customer niche and ensures context relevancy for your Web site. The latter is becoming critical to garner high rankings on Alta Vista, Google and Inktomi.

Advertise cost-effectively online at other Web sites your customers are likely to visit. These don't necessarily have to be expensive, top-tier sites.

Use online media buying methods to save money. For example, look at Mediapassage — formerly Ad Auction and One Media Place — for some unsold inventory and bid with the best of them for a deal.

Make opt-in e-mail the centerpiece of your marketing campaign. Now is the time to negotiate a 90- to 120-day media plan with some of the market leaders; yesmail.com, one of our favorites, is currently offering a discount of 10 percent to 30 percent.

And use HTML. Your ad copy will look much better and will in turn drive better click-through results. This is only the case, however, if you are a business-to-consumer (B2C) business. If you're business-to-business (B2B), plain text is more professional than HTML.

Immerse your business in the online community by posting to newsgroups.

Posts announcing a product or a service — or a product giveaway — are OK to send. But they should be identified as commercial posts, be sent through the newsgroup administrator, be worded carefully so they don't offend readers, be posted individually to each newsgroup, and offer some incentive to this particular group.

Posts can also be purely educational, such as those presented in the form of questions or answers. This type of post also generates market awareness and motivates members to make comments about your product or service.

Remember the truism that any PR is better than no PR.

Ask your customers where they would recommend you place your advertising. Which Web sites, discussion lists, chat forums, newsletters or opt-in e-mail lists do they belong to?

Everybody likes to be valued for opinions, so reach out and ask for input. You'll be pleasantly surprised.

Think and act like a guerrilla marketer. Incorporate guerrilla-marketing techniques to drive your business in unique ways. Go to the source, the guy who coined the term and many of the processes, Jay Conrad Levinson.

Ready for some don'ts?

Don't use TV, radio or billboard advertising unless you have a lot of money to spend - usually millions. They work to develop brands, but they don't always allow you to reach your customers.

When was the last time you jumped up from watching television to write down a URL you saw splashed across the screen or stopped your car while driving down your local boulevard when you saw a billboard that caught your attention? Not very often!

Don't pay top dollar for banner advertising. Negotiate a good deal for yourself and don't believe sales reps when they tell you all inventory is sold out. There is a lot of unsold inventory out there. Just look at the number of house ads running on Web sites right now. Do some old-fashioned digital horse-trading and leverage your media buy.

Don't base your business on the high-tide-raises-all-boats model. A storm is brewing, and we're telling our clients to batten down the hatches and leverage their marketing dollars as much as possible. The party is over, and it's time to get down to building viable business models based on selling tangible goods and services.

Don't use biz speak in your marketing communications. If I see another Web site that repeatedly uses the term "first-mover advantage," I'm going back to the radio for news and information.

Be real: Clearly tell people what you do, how you do it, and what the value is based on. This enables them to quickly understand what your business is all about.