Chapter 1

Using the World Wide Web for Marketing - - What Are You Trying to Accomplish?

Marketing on the World Wide Web finds us stepping off the highway of 500 cable channels and into a quiet field of 500 million channels. These aren't broadcast channels. They don't spew reruns, sitcoms, and talk shows sprinkled with infomercials and 30 attention-getters. These are informative messages patiently waiting for us to interact with them.

The Web offers information to people who might be willing to reach in and pull it out. Kristin Zhivago, publisher of the Marketing Technology newsletter (www.zhivago.com), understood this difference and clearly illustrated it in her February 1994 issue:

If your delivery medium was water, broadcasting would be like using a big hose to spray a crowd of prospects, hoping some of them will enjoy getting wet. Narrowcasting, a term used by producers of specialized cable TV programs, is like using a smaller hose and only aiming it at people who have already expressed an interest in getting wet. Cybercasting (marketing online) is the act of creating a pond of water in cyberspace, telling people that you now have a pond, and inviting them to come for a swim. Prospects can visit your pond anytime they want, stay as long as they want, and dive in as deeply as they want. The extent to which they immerse themselves in your pond is determined completely by their own personal interest.

Some people may come just to look around. Some may take a dip. Some may swim, and some may stay submerged for days at a time. The faster, better looking, easier to navigate, more fun, and more informative your Web site is, the more likely it is that people will want to come back--and even bring their friends. But let's get these in priority order, shall we? Here's what's crucial:

Fast
Interesting
Useful

A slow Web site will work against you, and I'll dig into that subject in Chapter 3, "The Usable Web--Be Kind to Your Users." An interesting site will draw people in and keep them coming back. But a useful site really takes advantage of what the Web is best at: getting things done.

The whole point is to engage your target audience right up front and give them something of value, something that holds their attention, something they find useful, something they'll tell their friends about.

The World Wide Web allows an organization to create a library of materials anybody with an Internet connection can access. The ability to allow prospects and customers to get things done by entering data, looking things up, configuring product solutions, and so forth, means the possibilities are more restricted by the limits of imagination and available resources than by technology. Therefore, the first step toward marketing on the Web is to get a handle on realistic goals.

Each establishment, be it corporate, not-for-profit, entrepreneurial, or "other," must determine what it hopes to gain by implementing a global, electronic presence. You undoubtedly spend a great deal of time and effort on every magazine ad or direct mail project. Maintaining this level of effort is even more critical on the Web. Your message is available to millions, so special care is required to create a Web site that will elicit the desired response. Knowing what you want out of your site in the first place is the only way to ensure you might get there and have a chance at measuring your success.

Knowing the possibilities doesn't help much because there are so many:

• Improve corporate image
• Improve customer service
• Find and test new prospects
• Increase visibility and awareness
• Perform transactions
• Discover and enter new markets
• Improve customer retention
• Reduce costs

How do you best determine goal prioritization? That depends on your corporate goals, your personal goals, and your customers' goals. In order to know your goals, you need to know what's possible.

The Leading-Edge Image

In the mid-1990s, deciding between an empty storefront and a delayed storefront was a tough choice. If you took the time to build a robust Web site, your competitor might steal your thunder. Put up a site too quickly, and you take the chance your public will be disappointed by hasty efforts. News of a new, exciting, intriguing Web site traveled only slightly faster on the Internet than the latest e-mailed joke.

Today, having a site at all is a foregone conclusion. Well, almost. An article published on September 19, 2000 in USA Today pointed out a few laggards. "More than 99 percent of Fortune 1000 companies have corporate Web sites, setting up an awkward race for being last to the Web. The competitors: Adams Resources & Energy (1999 revenue of $4 billion), Jacobs Engineering Group ($2.9 billion), Grand Union ($2.3 billion), Stater Bros. ($1.8 billion), and Charming Shoppes ($1.2 billion)."

Not having a site whatsoever seems like trying to do business without a phone or a fax machine. Having a site that's cool and looks sharp is fine if that's all your target market is really after. The game, though, will go to those who come up with unique services. If you have to choose between fun, interesting, or useful, useful wins. Every time. Hands down.

In order to create the impression of being a leading-edge company, you have to create the image of a company that cares about its customers. Create the image that your company cares enough to explore new technologies and master them for the benefit of your clients. A leading-edge image also informs your clients that your company is financially strong. It is willing to take on new projects that seem merely service-related, rather than revenue-driven.

While superior service will bring superior profit, inferior service will certainly have a negative effect on the balance sheet. If your competitors have robust fax-back systems, sophisticated voice mail, and efficient Web sites and you don't, the marketplace will assume you are not profitable. You must not have enough resources to support your clients in the manner to which they have become accustomed. Or you simply don't care.

Nowadays, a leading-edge image is hard earned through the successful hosting of information and services that make life easier for customers. That means some serious investment in your Web site rather than mild experimentation funded by curiosity and spare time.

A company with a leading-edge image becomes a magnet for leading-edge employees. Don't forget to post your job openings on your Web site to attract talented staff members. It may seem that this task belongs more to the human resources department than the marketing department, but job postings give your prospects the impression of a vital, growing, successful organization.

When all is said and done, the only sure-fire way to create a leading-edge image is to create new services that weren't possible in 1993 (the Pre-Mosaic Era). More on this--a lot more--in Chapter 4, "Interactivity Goes with the Flow."

Prospect Qualification

It is possible to make a profit through all selling and no marketing. It is possible to make a profit through all marketing and no selling. A salesperson can walk door to door with a case of samples and sell them without spending a dime on marketing. A pizza company can bake and deliver truckloads of pizzas through ads in newspapers, the Yellow Pages, and direct mail without any salespeople. Most businesses, though, fit between these two extremes and will greatly benefit from a site designed to lead the prospect through the persuasion process.

The cost of an hour of a salesperson's time differs for each firm and for each product. Without a doubt, a major part of the marketing function is to find the largest number of the most qualified buyers, so it falls to the marketing department to keep the salesperson selling instead of prospecting. For a company involved in the sale of a sophisticated product with a long lead time, the most attractive goal of an Internet Web site is to shorten the sales cycle. A prospect may require a good deal of education before understanding and appreciating the product and making a reasonable buying decision. If so, the World Wide Web is a wonderful place for promotion.

Photographs, technical detail, and the answers to the most frequently asked questions are all available at any time of day or night. Every time somebody understands the electronic answer to a pressing question, he or she has saved your salesperson cumulative minutes of telephone time and who knows how much time tracking down the answer. As a result, the salesperson spends more time with prospects toward the end of the sale's cycle, instead of at the beginning, in the education phase.

Because the Web site has become the electronic prospect qualifier and tutor, your salespeople can concentrate on making more sales.

Product Sales

Technical companies were successfully using the Internet for marketing long before the World Wide Web arrived. Their fax-back systems, Gopher sites, and file transfer protocol (FTP) sites were information vending machines. If information is made available, people will fetch it as long as it has value. Depending on the product, the results can be surprising.

Your Web site might be able to close the deal without the help of a salesperson. Your Web site might allow prospects to select colors, styles, configurations, shipping methods, and payment terms. Your system can then print pick lists, shipping labels, and invoices without human intervention.

InterCon Systems Corporation in Herndon, Virginia, made networking software for Macintosh and Windows platforms. Granted, it had a built-in audience on the Internet, but its experience is still interesting. Several years ago, Jeff Osborn, then vice president of sales at InterCon, decided to try putting up an FTP server. He populated the directories with descriptive documents and trial versions of InterCon's software. The software would run for 30 days and then quit unless the keycode was provided via e-mail.

Jeff set the system up on a Friday afternoon and went home for the weekend. He accessed his server several times over the next two days to test it and to marvel in the ability to publish his promotional materials worldwide. On Monday he checked the logs to make sure his transactions were recorded. He discovered that 500 people had logged onto this unannounced, unpublicized machine and had taken a look at the software.

Two weeks later, InterCon received a wire transfer from the Republic of Kazakhstan for more than $10,000 for software that had been downloaded via FTP. InterCon e-mailed the customer the 20-digit code to unlock the software. Jeff still laughs at how they might try to calculate the cost of goods sold.

Customer Service

One of the best uses for a new communications medium is customer contact. The customer service department should always be the first to receive new methods of information exchange. The telephone, the telex, the fax, and voice mail all began as curiosities, then found their way into more and more companies. Before long, they became a requirement for helping and keeping customers. The World Wide Web belongs on this list as well.

Customer service desks and help desks have already discovered the value of the database. With telephone headset in place and hands on the keyboard, the freshest recruit can provide the most detailed explanation and answer the toughest question. The bottleneck has been information delivery. The World Wide Web offers a method that is faster and more direct than fax-back. This meaty subject is covered in more detail in the next chapter, "Customer Service First."

Customer Interaction and Feedback

Web sites can contain forms to fill out, including long text blocks for lengthy comments. In this way, they are like e-mail. A Web site can also contain areas where visitors can post comments to be read by all. In this way, they share attributes with newsgroups. Web sites can include questions that can be answered with a click of the mouse. In this way, they are like surveys.

Online, interactive communication with your customers and prospects allows more direct feedback than ever. Each phase of product development, positioning, and promotion can include the most intelligent, experienced, and expert resource on earth--your customers. They become part of your team. That's what Chapter 6, "Feedback," is all about.

Internal Communications

The marketing task is not directed entirely outward. A great deal of time is spent communicating within the walls of a corporation. Getting everybody to understand product positioning or corporate vision can be daunting. Keeping the sales force aware of product line changes and pricing updates is a monumental task. Just as the Web offers better communications to prospects and customers, it can offer better communications internally. Every data capture event, every report, every scheduling task can be managed with an intranet.

There are many good books on creating intranets for your company; this one is about marketing. It's worth a moment, though, to think about how an intranet can benefit the marketing department. If you're not using Web services inside your company for internal communications, your competitor is about to eat your lunch.

Web Site Traffic as Its Own Reward

The billboard philosophy tells us to place our names in front of people as often as possible. The more product impressions people see, the more likely they are to remember, trust, and buy the product. Some Web sites are designed with foot traffic in mind. Internet shopping malls and periodical e-zines (electronic magazines) are trying to sell advertising space based on the number of people who visit their sites.

Causing people to make a habit of visiting a particular Web site is a unique challenge. If your purpose for a public Web site is to disseminate technical information, the number of new visitors may not be important. If your goal is a high degree of awareness and a change in your branding, you can use techniques that encourage repeat visits. Or you can simply buy ad space or sponsorship at other sites.

But we'll assume that your goal is to find new prospects, turn them into customers, and keep them buying from you for as long as you have products and services to sell and they have the means to buy. This brings us to the single, most important question to ask when determining what your highest Web site development priorities should be: What do your customers want?

What Do Customers Want?

If this question seems like an afterthought, you need to get out of the 1950s and join the rest of the world. After World War II, the United States was deep into the production era. It all started back in the 1920s when Henry Ford hit on this wild idea of the assembly line.

Instead of having craftsmen working all over the place, he brought together all the people and materials in one location and got them working sequentially. Cars came rolling off the line and onto waiting trains that carried them all over the country. The philosophy was this: Build things cheaper and faster and get them out there and people will buy them.

It's not like that any more. People discovered mass-customization and started wanting to have things custom made to their specifications. "Have it your way at Burger King" was not a blast of brilliance by a burger boss; it was the recognition that people were becoming more and more demanding. In modern times, this means moving from asking customers for their opinion to making their ideas a central part of your planning process. How do you do that? First, figure out who the audience is.

Who Comes to Your Site?

Make a list of all the different kinds of people who come to your site, focusing on the noncustomers to start with. Here's a sample list:

Press
Students
Investors
Potential employees
Potential vendors
Marketing partners
Channel sales partners

Students are looking for the big picture, the trends, the technologies, and the shifts in the marketplace on which they can hang a thesis. Investors want the financials and the assurances. Potential employees want to know about corporate culture and job opportunities. Vendors want to know what you sell to determine if you're a prospect for their goods and services. Marketing partners and channel partners want the latest marketing materials and product information. Everybody's after something different. Catering to them pays off. They're going to pester you for information anyway, so you might as well put it online and make it easier on them and on yourself.

Then it's time to see what you have in the way of customers. In the next chapter, I'll get into the customer life cycle and the lifetime value of a customer. For now, let's look at the different shapes and sizes customers come in.

What's My Line?

Chances are excellent that you sell to more than one vertical industry. Thermedics, Inc. (www.thermedicsinc.com) sells plastic tubing to the medical world, the industrial world, and the world of optical applications (see Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1  Thermedics describes the same products in different ways to different industries.

The medical visitors can learn about Thermedics' plastics in terms of biostability, reaction to radiation sterilization, and solubility in organic solvents. Visitors from the industrial side of the fence learn about stone guard applications for automotive use, computer privacy screens, leading-edge protection for aircraft wings and rotor blades, breathable fabrics, and UV resistant fabric coatings (air blimps, protective coverings for aircraft, etc.).

Those interested in the optical uses of these products discover that they "are designed to adhere to dissimilar materials such as glass, polycarbonate, acrylic, and CAB (Cellulose Acetate Butyrate). These laminating films can be used for Architectural or Transportational Glazings. Architectural resins can be formulated to resist repeated physical attacks, bullets, and explosive blasts. These products are widely used in prisons, jails, mental hospitals, and service station kiosks, banks, and ATM machines.

Transportation applications are armored vehicles, limousines, money transports, and military vehicles." You may be selling the same product, but you're selling it into different markets, and those markets are inspired by different features and benefits.

Role Playing

It seems obvious that people who do different jobs would have different interests when it comes to your products and services. The person who uses the product will be motivated by ease of use or size and shape. The person with her finger on the figures is interested in financing or return on investment. The company buyer is more interested in availability. The logistics coordinator wants to know how many are shipped at once, what size tractor-trailer will fit which loading dock, and whether you can drop-ship them to their clients.

National Semiconductor (www.national.com) asked its customers what they wanted on the site. and the answer was pretty much what it expected. Electronics design engineers wanted every single specification about every single component National offers. The company was more than happy to replace its Manhattan-phonebook-sized catalog with no-charge-to-ship Web pages.

But Phil Gibson, the change agent responsible for National's Web efforts, saw that the company was leaving out a big chunk of its customers. Buyers have one job and one job only: Get the stuff the engineers want, when they want it, at the best price possible. They don't care about speeds, feeds, sizes, temperature, or form-factors. Price and availability are all they have on their minds.

Price information crosses over multiple organizations. If a buyer has an approved requisition on her desk for a large number of parts, she wants to be able to comparison shop. The parts are identified by a very specific National Semiconductor part number, but the price and availability might change from distributor to distributor. The solution? Access.

National's My Private Bill of Materials (Figure 1.2) lets buyers look at the inventory levels of 50 distributors and source the buy. Some distributors have enough stock; others do not. The price may be higher at the distributor in Taiwan, but because the customer factory is in Malaysia, the difference in shipping is significant. The time and money it saves the purchase agent are remarkable.

Figure 1.2  National Semiconductor created the Purchasing Web section to cater to purchasing agents. Smart.

Although it's fairly easy to identify who does what based on their job titles, it is not easy to determine who influences a corporate decision. If you're selling directly to consumers, the story is really only a little different. In the business world, sales people all over have been trained in the mysteries of Strategic Selling: The Unique Sales System Proven Successful by America's Best Companies by Robert B. Miller, Stephen E. Heiman, and Tad Tuleja (Warner Books, 1998).

Strategic Selling identified four kinds of people involved in the buying process: economic, user, technical, and advocate. The economic influencer is looking for the ROI and the best deal. The user wants to make sure the purchase is going to actually help him or her reach his or her goals, rather than inflict more overhead that will stifle productivity. The technical buyer is there to try and find the unspoken limitations before the product reaches the door and causes more trouble than it's worth. Finally, the advocate has been presold on the idea and is the salesperson's best ally in the struggle to make the sale.

Strategic Selling walks through how to deal with each of these individuals. It will be well worth your while to read this cornerstone of American selling and think about what sort of information might appeal to which sort of influencer in your marketplace--even if the economic influencer is Mom, the advocate is Dad, the technical side is represented by the teenage son, and the user is the grade-school daughter.

Size Matters

Chances are excellent that you sell into businesses of various sizes. Companies pulling in less than $10 million per year make decisions differently from those raking in billions. It's not necessarily easier for one over the other; they just have different concerns.

So now we have a growing matrix of customer classifications. If you add them all up, you might find hundreds of possible combinations. Technical influencers in the medical industry who work for small companies are going to be swayed by different types of persuasion on your site than administrative assistants working for large industrial corporations.

Identifying all of them is not the aim of this exercise. You're trying to identify those who are the most likely to buy. The only way you can determine that is to find those with attributes most like your current customers. Stop for a moment and make a list of the three to five most important business sectors, the two or three most important influencers, and the size of company most likely to become a customer. For each cross-section you come up with, it's time to figure out what motivates them.

Figuring Out What Customers Want

Check out your competitors' sites. Read the trade magazines in your industry. Talk to your customers directly. What might each group want from you? When you have some real, live feedback from your actual marketplace, it's time to put on your thinking cap and see what else you can invent. Brainstorming is the most fun I have in my consulting practice. I do it for companies large and small and enjoy doing it on the fly at conferences.

I was recently at an eMarketing conference and sat in on a Q&A session with Patricia Seybold after she had given one of the keynote presentations in her usual informative and example-filled style. The marketing manager from a natural gas company asked for help understanding the results of a promotional program on his site. With the intention of making the site sticky (getting people to stick around longer) and getting them to come back more often, they instigated a "frequent-clicker" program. The more articles you read, the more pages you viewed, and the more times you came back, the more points you could earn. The points were redeemable for tee-shirts, hats, golf balls, you name it, with the company logo on them. Fiasco. He asked Patricia and the collected discussion group why it had failed so miserably.

"Why would I want a baseball cap with your logo on it?" came the first question from the assembly.

"Well," he defended himself, "it's working for Pepsi."

"Yeah, but Pepsi is a brand that says I'm part of the hip, younger generation. I'm associating with the brand and borrowing brand attributes for myself. What will my friends think of me if I proudly put a gas company logo on my head? No thanks."

"So what would be the right thing for my site?"

Patricia asked the zinger, "What does a gas company customer want from the gas company?"

The answers came quickly and stopped coming just as fast, "Lower bills." "Service if there's a problem." That was it. A room full of natural gas users couldn't think of anything else they might want. And then it was time to brainstorm:

An energy audit of my small business to save me money

Discounts on products and services that'll improve my insulation

Emergency numbers to call and a manned chat session to click on if I smell gas

A calculator that shows the impact of an annual level-payment plan

A calculator that shows the cost savings of a gas stove over an electric stove

A directory of local plumbers who are certified by the gas company

Lower my bills. Help me out in an emergency. Keep your hats to yourself.

The old saw says that nobody wants a 1/4-inch drill bit, they want a 1/4-inch hole. That's good as far as it goes, but it doesn't go far enough. Nobody really wants a 1/4-inch hole; they want a chair or a dresser or a new shelf. When figuring out what customers want, first figure out what they are trying to accomplish. Are they building a dog house? Are they implementing a new database? Are they looking for a prime location for a seminar?

Once you have a firm picture in your mind of a particular type of customer with a typical set of goals to accomplish, then you can really start dreaming up and researching what would help those customers be successful.

Talk to your customers and find out who they are and what they want. We'll take a closer look at how in Chapter 6, "Feedback." For now, it's time to turn up the juice on how you can help your customers reach their goals.

How Innovative Can You Be?

The most valuable virtues of the Internet are the most important to keep in mind at this stage. They are the qualities you are going to bend to your will. They revolve around the ability to communicate. They deal with the ability to make information available to people around the globe at any time of day or night. They are wrapped up in the fact that there is a computer on either end and customers and prospective customers can access your database of aggregate information, or run a program you've written especially for them, or engage in asynchronous conversations with like-minded people without cost.

This is where a good brainstorming session can put you on the map as a leader in your industry and a formidable competitor. This is where you foster the ideas that will earn you public attention, critical acclaim, and loyal customers. There's only one drawback--you can't do it all. You have to prioritize.

What Your Budget Allows

Even if you did have more money than Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, and the Sultan of Brunei combined, there aren't enough hours in the day to accomplish all the great things you'll come up with in the focused brainstorming session. You have to choose. Fortunately, this isn't nearly as hard as it seems. Just ask yourself (and a team of your most creative people) the following questions:

Which of your ideas are the easiest to implement?
Which are the least expensive to implement?
Which will most efficiently take you in the direction you want to go in the long run?
Which will provide the most value to your customers?

Table 1.1 Prioritizing Your Brightest Web Ideas

		Easy	Cheap	Direction	Value to Customer
Idea One
Idea Two
Idea Three
Etc...
Totals

Then quickly assign a value from 1 to 5 for each attribute of each idea. On a scale of 1 to 5, how much time will it take? Will it take a lot of time? Give it a 5. Will it be pretty easy? Give it a 1. Expensive? 5. Cheap? 1. Add the values up, and the results will be your priority order. The one with the lowest scores are always the winners, right?

Almost.

You have one more critical element to consider before you green-light any of these wonderful projects.

What Your Management Wants

What do the executives with their hands on the corporate wallet want?

Corporate goals change from time to time so it's important to scope out the current direction in which your chief executives are headed. Are they out to open new territories? Cut costs? Beat the competition?

Read over the speeches they've recently given in public, and then look over the internal memos they've penned and the pronouncements they've made inside the company. Yes, they'll be slightly contradictory, but your purpose is to select those projects that move the company toward those internal objectives and allow the CEO to point to your project to the outside world as proof that the firm is living up to previously made public promises.

Before creating the killer PowerPoint presentation that proves to upper management you have measurable metrics in mind to prove the return on investment, you have one last task ahead of you. Verify your brainy ideas with your customers. Remember them?

Yes, you went to them at the beginning of this process, but now that you've proven your astonishing powers of creativity by concocting more than a few brilliant ideas, you really should go find out if your customers think you're as brilliant as you and your mother do. Then it's time to go to the executive board, not just with killer PowerPoint slides and ROI calculations, but with a big thumbs-up from your best customers.

Go out into the world with a video camera, and come back to the boardroom with actual customers in their native habitats telling the budget-masters what customers really want for Christmas. There's nothing like hearing something from the horse's mouth. When the desire for a new Web service or better online information comes directly from customers, top executives will try to take credit for the idea. Let them-it's one sure way of getting project funding.

So what do customers want? First and foremost, better customer service. Think customer service, think Chapter 2...

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