Internet Marketing

Having a website to advertise and sell your products and services has now become essential  for companies in the vast majority of business sectors in the UK.

A web site has the potential to be viewed by the 45 million plus people estimated to have internet access in the UK plus 100’s of millions throughout the world.

There are currently over 2.7 million SME (small and medium enterprise) business web sites for British companies but over 60% of the companies do not actively promote them online according to research by Microsoft.

For many businesses their web site is a source of immense frustration because it simply doesn’t deliver what most business owners anticipated, lots of new customers!

The reason for the lack of new customers is invariably down to this lack of effective Internet marketing. A lot of firms make the assumption that because their company web site looks good or that their products and services are great value that it should follow that the site will perform well in terms of sales or leads. However in reality this is like setting up a lovely shop or business premises on a plot of land away from the high street or shopping centre, not visible from the main road and with limited public access!

The result is of course that your potential new customers don’t know that you exist and are never going to find out unless an existing customer tells them about you (referral).

Marketing with measurable return on investment

The benefits of an effective Internet marketing strategy

An effective Internet marketing strategy can deliver the new customers you are looking for right to your online business premises and it will deliver them at the point when they are looking to buy. This is the key difference between Internet marketing and traditional forms of advertising, if someone makes a search on line using a key phrase that is a good match for your business products or services then there is a very good chance that they can be closed or sold to, a much better chance in fact than putting an advert in a paper or a magazine where a large % of people will either scan straight past it or are not in the buying vein at that moment and then throw it away. Of course what happens is that when they do decide they need to buy many go online in search of a provider, are they going to find you or your competitors?

Interestingly although many SME business owners and directors have not yet used Internet marketing to promote their businesses on line, a majority confirm that they have themselves used search engines to find and buy products and services from other companies!