Small business owners in the not-so-high streets of the 21st Century are facing greater challenges than ever before but...
Can You Imagine A Worse Case Scenario Than This?
What Possible Use Is The Internet In These Circumstances?
- How could it increase your customer base?
- How could it contribute to your till receipts?
- How could you learn how to use it?
- How could you use it when you don’t even own a computer?
- How could it help you get more sales from your existing clientele?
- How could it help you get new customers?
- How could it help you compete with the multiples?
- How could it help you sustain your aspirations?
- How could it help you build the business so that one day you might be in a position to sell out?
- How could you afford to use it?
We’ll talk more about the extreme scenario of the beleaguered Oswaldtwistle storekeeper in the next chapter, but meanwhile let’s start by exploring the internet for the purpose it was devised. And as you read through the chapters to follow, you may be surprised at just how much that original purpose can do for you and your own small local enterprise.
Use The Web For The Purpose For Which It Was Devised
Several decades ago the internet was first used by the Government of the United States of America with one dual purpose in mind:
- The electronic delivery of sensitive information;
- The receipt of equally sensitive data.
That purpose has not changed; it is the foundation stone on which all effective, dynamic online marketing is based. Nowadays, though, the impression is often that the internet has developed into an automatic electronic money-making machine. Not so, not now, not ever. Without question it is the most powerful and cost effective marketing device of the 21st Century, but you can only make it work when you know why it works.
Making The Internet Work For Your Small Business
- How do you do that?
- How do you make the internet work for you in your small business operation?
- And what’s in it for you?
Here’s how someone viewed the situation a few years back ...
Bill Gates’ prediction failed to materialise. Perhaps he allowed personal vanity to overrule sanity because there are hundreds of thousands of commercial concerns worldwide who don’t do any business online and yet continue to prosper.
But that does not mean to say that these businesses don’t make best use of online marketing. Most of them do.
So, How Do You Make Online Marketing Work For You?
Use the internet for the purpose for which it was invented; use it as a channel of information.
- A channel for receivable information;
- A channel for deliverable information.
Doing It This Way Provides You With Two Valuable Operational Devices
The facility to receive information opens the door to ongoing market research for even the smallest of enterprises, while the facility to deliver information electronically presents you with an internet marketing application with dynamic potential.
Using online search facilities ...
- You can keep an eye on the marketplace, trends, and what the competition is up to;
- You can source valuable applications and software – and often for free;
- You can be on the lookout for trading opportunities.
Using the internet as a marketing application you can create a powerful website to:
- promote your small enterprise;
- promote your location;
- promote your merchandise;
- foster customer loyalty;
- service customer requirements;
- capture email addresses which build up into lists of potential customers.
You can do all of this – and if you go about matters in the right way, you can do it all for next to nothing in the way of investment – even if right now you don’t know the difference between a keyboard and a washboard.