WSI

e-Marketing Solutions

The Internet as a marketing medium offers exceptional sales and brand building potential for the small or medium-size business owner. Internet marketing is highly cost effective, offers many unique advantages that traditional advertising can't match and almost gives smaller businesses an unfair advantage over much larger firms (read on to find out why).
Internet Marketing activities are generally focused on two goals; generating traffic to your website (to prospect leads, increase sales etc.) and enhancing the value of your brand. These are typical goals, even of traditional marketing, but on the Internet they take on an entirely new dimension.

Search Engines, Banners and Beyond

By now you may have noticed a recurring theme on this website; the fact that an Internet presence is worthless unless people-- your customers--can find it. It's the 'Being Found' in our ABC's of Internet Success and it's a critical component of any Internet Solution. Fortunately, the Internet offers many affordable ways to increase your online visibility.
For delivering more traffic to your website, search engine marketing is hard to beat. Search engines are the #1 method consumers use to find everything they're looking for online. Being listed and achieving a top rank on your industry's keywords can deliver a significant stream of prospects that are actively looking for the kinds of products or services you offer. Experienced sellers know that reaching a potential customer during the right phase of their buying cycle is key to converting interest into a sale. Search engines have the unique ability to connect with prospects at the exact moment they're researching a product or service to buy; they want to find your business... so make sure they can!

Five Reasons You Need a Search Engine Marketing Strategy:

• Build an ongoing stream of profitable traffic to your website
• Connect with customers when they're making a buying decision
• Maximize your ad spending by targeting only relevant keywords
• Most cost effective way of expanding your market
• If customers can't find you they'll find your competition

Other methods of traffic generation can help round out your overall strategy and reach those consumers who may not be savvy searchers. These methods include banner ads on other websites, link exchanges, even offline promotions that direct people to a sale page or other area of your website. Success with these, as with any advertising, lies in making sure your ads are being seen by the right group of people at the right time, and that means knowing who you're targeting and where they can be found. The Internet can give you more information about your prospects than any other advertising medium we can show you how to best take advantage of this in your own website marketing plan.

Email Marketing - Fast, Affordable and Effective

Email marketing is so effective (when executed correctly) and so inexpensive that an entire industry has emerged to support it. Email marketing offers unprecedented targeting capabilities allowing you to customize your messages to appeal to different groups of customers for much higher response rates.

Building a client email list should be a top priority for any business owner, but there's more to it than just collecting names and addresses. Email advertising systems, are capable of categorizing your customers on just about any criteria you can think of. This is important because the more relevant your message is to the recipient, the better your results will be. Want to run a promotion for customers in a specific postal code range? You can do that. How about sending a different message to male customers than you do to female customers? You can do that too. You can even get really creative and categorize customers based on the types of items they buy from you (and then notify them about new accessories, styles or models)! At WSI we can show you how to build this type of capability into your email advertising efforts quickly and easily.

The Top 3 Advantages of Email Marketing:

• Unmatched customer targeting and tracking capability
• Lowest cost per unit of any advertising medium
• Creates ongoing awareness of your brand and offerings

So why is email marketing important to your business? Put simply, today's consumer has a long list of buying options and a very short memory. Staying in regular contact with your customers is one of the best ways to remind them that you still exist and appreciate their business. Regular newsletters, promotions and announcements will keep your business fresh in their minds, and they'll appreciate the personalized and relevant information you're sending them. It's about building customer loyalty and the Internet makes it easier than ever.

Big Branding on a Budget

Thanks to the virtual nature of the Internet, smaller businesses can have an online presence that looks every bit as impressive as those of the big brands-without spending millions on brand development and promotion. A fresh looking, professionally designed Internet Solution is affordable even for businesses with a limited budget, and they're flexible enough to grow as the business does.

In fact, many of today's biggest Internet brands got to where they are without flashy TV commercials or big advertising campaigns. Instead, they relied on a solid, reliable Internet Solution and used Internet marketing methods to get the word out. Search engine marketing, banners and link sharing drove traffic to their websites, establishing and growing a customer base. Then they focused on building strong relationships with those customers by being attentive to their needs and offering products and services that were relevant and in demand.

It sounds simple, and thanks to the Internet it really is. We can show you how to turn your business into a successful e-Business with innovative and affordable Internet marketing solutions.

Ready for results? To discuss a customised website marketing strategy for your business, Contact us today.

Search Engine Optimization

Why is search engine optimization important?

As explained in the "Being Found" section of our ABC's of Internet Success, ensuring customers can easily find your website when they're looking for it is a critical consideration not to be overlooked. According to VeriSign, over 1 million new Web addresses are registered every month - that's over 40,000 per day. How do consumers find their way through all these sites? The answer is search engines.
You've probably heard of Google, Yahoo!, MSN and others. These are the big players in the search engine business and millions upon millions of people use them every day to find everything from stock tips to sports cars. Google alone boasts over 200 million searches every day, and that number keeps on growing. Even if you've never thought about search engines before, these statistics illustrate how important it is for your website to be listed in them. But being listed isn't enough; you also need to achieve a high ranking in the search results to benefit from the considerable amount of traffic they can send to your website.

Have you ever wondered why some sites turn up at the top of any given search result while others are buried 10, 20 or 100 pages down?

There are specific techniques used when building a website that can determine whether or not a search engine can actually find the website to begin with, and then where it ranks that site in its database. These techniques are referred to as search engine optimization (often abbreviated as SEO) and are really quite complex. That's because searchers demand only the most relevant results from their searches, so the search engines are constantly changing and refining the way they capture and categorize content. It takes an SEO optimizatoin expert to understand this constantly evolving process and to implement the techniques that ensure a top ranking. At WSI we offer these expert SEO services as part of your new Internet Marketing Solution, or as an upgrade to your existing website. Either way, this essential service will deliver more targeted traffic to your website, unlocking the full potential of your online presence.

To discuss a traffic (and profit!) generating SEO program for your website, Contact us today.

Research and Development Services for Internet Technology and Internet Marketing Innovation

WSI also provide research and development services for Internet technology and Internet Marketing innovation. We help clients test and develop new and innovative ideas for web based technology and internet related marketing initiatives. Please contact Richard Wagstaff to find out more.

Did You Know ?

• Shoppers use the web to compare local prices before leaving home to buy.
• Consumers now search the web for businesses instead of loking through the phone book.
• Web searches generate more in-store sales every day.
• The fastest way to increase sales is being found in local web searches.
• Local web searches traffic to business than the phone book.
• Prospects are trying to find your busines on the web right now.