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Marketing Suggestions
Some basic advice for hotrodding marketers and companies:
- The Internet is not a digital magazine. Offline print publications are centralized, one-way methods of communication. The Internet is a distributed, open method of communication. Traditional print marketing methods have not been particularly successful when applied to the Internet. The best online marketing strategies are the ones that account for the fact that people will be publicly and openly discussing your products and your company.
- Internet users are typically more savvy than their "offline" demographic counterparts. By the time a consumer encounters your online marketing presence, he has already pre-qualified himself by demonstrating the ability to operate a computer and navigate the Internet. Internet users typically have higher incomes, more education, and more social understanding and media savvy than their offline demographic equivalents.
- You are not anonymous on the Internet. Most of the time, when you communicate on the Internet, it's easy for webmasters to track your IP address, as well as other identifying information. This can be tied to your name, your location, and a wealth of information about your business and your professional and personal life. Specifically, bear in mind that fraudulent use of multiple personae for commercial gain is considered a particularly egregious offense in online culture.
- Track your marketing campaigns. Most legitimate web advertising campaigns involve paying for a certain amount of ad impressions, clicks, or "actions", often in relation with a specific keyword or keyphrase. Any time you pay for a source of traffic, you will need to qualitatively assess its value, with your own analysis tools. How many clicks did you get from that online advertising campaign? When those clicks reached your site, what percent of them signed up for your newsletter, or emailed you for product literature? If they bought from your web store, what was the total dollar value of all the goods purchased from clicks originating from that campaign? Which incoming keywords and keyphrases were most likely to result in a purchase, or an assigned "action"? What keywords and keyphrases comprise the most valuable "semantic landscape" in your industry? Try this website, or this book.
- Pre-establish your online reputation. If your first appearance online is to defend your products or your company, you will most likely fail. If you advertise your business ventures in a forum prior to establishing a reputation, then your efforts will most likely be rejected (or worse, lampooned). If you have an established reputation on the net, then you will be familiar with online culture, and the online automotive community will be familiar with you. The best way to establish an online reputation for your company is to start communicating openly in forums. You can make the rounds of existing forums, or you can open a forum on your website, for communication among your customers and representatives from your business.
- Technical knowledge rules the online automotive world. In online automotive communities, the people and websites that garner the most respect are the ones that spread the most automotive knowledge. A single person can do this by correctly answering tech questions in various automotive forums, or a large company can do this by establishing a relevant library of tech articles on its website. In-depth and reliable information is prized, while veiled advertisements ("advertorials") are quickly detected and frowned upon.
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