Is Your Product a Good Candidate for Web Marketing Success?
Web Marketing Today, Issue 14, May 25, 1996
How do you know your service or product will succeed on the Internet? Perhaps that's the same question as whether your business will succeed on Main St., Your Town. You don't know until you try. And, thankfully, the entry price for marketing on the Web isn't so high it's out of your reach. But these are some questions you should be asking yourself:
What keywords would someone use to search for my business?
Once upon a time a couple of entrepreneurs came up with a T-shirt with a cartoon of someone "surfing" the Internet. It was cute, moderately-priced, and attractive to Net citizens. But how would someone find it? Keywords: T-shirt, Internet, gifts, novelty, first edition? If you were to look on any one of those words you would find thousands of entries in a Web search engine index. To succeed, you need some angle to differentiate yourself on the Web search engines. It may be geographic location, a unique niche, perhaps a combination of services that will bring you up when someone searches on two words at the same time. If your product is primarily an impulse buy, you'll have to find another way to get people to your Web site.
How many items will I have to sell from the Web to break even?
If your product is $9.95, you'll have to sell a lot. If it's $10,000, you only have to sell one every once-in-a-while. Another way to look at this is to ask how many items you have for sale. If you are selling a single product, the chance a Web surfer will purchase is low. If you sell a number of products, the chance someone will buy goes up dramatically. Usually it costs little more to sell many products.
Will I actively market my Web site?
I don't know of any successes for people who fell for the "you don't even need a computer" hype which sold them a Web site. Web marketing needs to be active to be effective. (See my article, "How to Attract Visitors to Your Web Site,"). Small business people may need to learn to do this yourself.
Do the people who need my product or service surf the Web?
A rapidly increasing number of people do surf the Web.
But the number of blue collar families is substantially less than
others, for example. Make sure your product or service is a match
with Web demographics.
Ask yourself these hard questions. Then, if you still think your product or service can succeed in this medium, why don't you give it a shot? Just make sure you proceed onto the Internet with hopes based in some semblance of reality.
