Selling Online #16 : Physical World Advertising

The last two months I’ve written about repeat customers. Now that we’re getting into the real riding season, I’m going to take the next series of issues to write about how you get people to your site in the first place so that they eventually can become repeat customers.

This first column in the series will ease us into the world of advertising your website by dealing with more traditional off-line advertising you are most likely familiar with: print, direct mail, sponsorships, etc. The main thing to keep in mind is to make sure your site’s URL is slapped on anything and everything that you print or that your customers see or take away from you.

As you get your head around the idea of off-line advertising of your on-line business, you’ll begin to realize why when I talked about coming up with a URL for your business that you should develop one one that’s short and easy to remember. No one wants to have to try to write down or remember www.crazybobsmotorworldpartsemporiumsuperstore.com. Not only that, but it’s not going to fit on a bumper sticker!

Regardless of how much advertising and marketing you’re used to doing in your local market, now that you are online, you’re going to have to start thinking on a national or even global level. You’ll have to start figuring out how to leverage your advertising budget to be able to advertise in national publications. You’ll also have to figure out how to communicate a unique selling proposition or call to action in your print ads to get people reading the publication to enter your URL into their web browser to see what you’re all about.

You also need to start thinking about how to advertise and communicate to other regions. For instance, if your dealership is in the north-east, and there’s not a lot of riding going on during a month like March, think about shifting your adverting dollars to advertise in a publication that has a concentrated distribution in the southwest or the south. That’s one of the great things about running an online business in our industry. You can use the global reach to help hedge against seasonal fluctuations in your local business!

In your advertising, your URL becomes one of the most important things that you need to communicate. I could even go so far as to say that it’s more important for people to remember your URL than it is for them to remember your company name. Of course if your company name is something like Buy.com or Amazon.com then they are one in the same.

Like all advertising, it’s a good idea to try to track the effectiveness of your offline advertising. You can often offer a deal in the advertisement if they visit a special URL or “landing page.” This “landing page” is different from how people normally get to your site. In fact, you want this page to not be indexed in any search engines or known anywhere else so that you can be sure that anyone hitting it had to come from your offline ad.

For example, if your main address is www.soopermotoparts.com, you could register another domain of something like www.soopermotopartsdeals.com. You advertise this secondary address, and all traffic to www.soopermotopartsdeals.com would be redirected to your main site. The trick is that your server can keep track of how many “hits” to the secondary domain happen during your advertising campaign to judge its effectiveness. You can also do this by creating a special page on your main site like www.soopermotoparts.com/specialpage.html and advertise that address. This can often fail however because a lot of people will just type the main domain (www.soopermotoparts.com) and you’ll lose visibility. You see big companies like Dell doing this a lot. Check out their ad next time on TV and you’ll probably see something like www.dell.com/tvoffer.

Don’t get too hung up on this because the measurement is not foolproof (fools are too clever!). Use it mainly as a go/no-go gauge for broad campaigns or to measure the response rate in a new publication to see if it’s worth continuing.

Next month we’ll move on to address the trials and tribulations of e-mail marketing. Unfortunately infamous as “spam,” there’s good ways and a lot of bad ways to handle direct e-mail marketing. When you do e-mail marketing it correctly it’s insanely effective. When you do it wrong, you’ll have crowds of angry villagers chasing you off the web with burning torches and pitch-forks! It’s all about opt-in, managing your lists, and targeting your customers with information that THEY want to hear, not with stuff that YOU want to tell them.

Tags:Column, DealerNews, dealerships, E-Commerce, ecommerce, internet, motorcycle, powersports, selling-online