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CBC WebNet Service

Small Business Marketing

The Ad Agency

Web design shops must now grow up to become full-service, interactive marketing and communications firms  or be left behind. In this respect, they must follow the lead of traditional ad agencies that have always provided a broad spectrum of marketing support services - not just pretty ads and flyers. It's not enough to sell a client that ad (or web site). To give clients full due they must be able to provide market research, offer thoughtful strategic marketing ideas - those that can be efficiently supported both electronically and  in print with consistent theme. Now, it's web site content that is to be translated to different forms of collateral material (film, print, spoken).

Web sites based on those services can be called "progressive web sites." Whatever name emerges, the people who provide them are not simply designers or developers, but strategic  thinkers and allies  who can offer back office Intranet  connection for on going collaboration. This new breed of support firm - "Electronic Marketing Services Companies"  like CBC -  offer small businesses a way to compete effectively in both traditional markets and the emerging world of commerce by  total E-Commerce.

The corporate presence web site has already been relegated to "white pages" status. What is emerging in its place is a far richer, more interactive, more capable type of web site. This web site doesn't just fly the company flag, it is the company itself, in electronic form, expressed on the Web.

That means moving from a static web site  to a continually evolving site that is consciously used as a sales, marketing and organizing tool. To get there requires an integrated management plan that provides for interactive databases to backend the site, for small companies it may be a move to digital subscriber line (DSL) connected web servers enabling one's own web hosting for web marketing.  

Web marketing means everything from using the Web to create strategic Internet affiliations with new partners, vendors and customers - even investors, by Virtual Private Networks (Internet connect protocols securing "who accesses what").

It means, too, an internal shift to electronic, collaborative publishing and marketing. In house staff and outsourced marketing support services collaborate instantly and continuously (via the VPN Intranet  part of the company's "web sites"). And, it may means the ability to offer support help for any re-training of in-house staff when necessary.

Now ask, what firms do you know - serving small businesses - who offer such renaissance capability in a day when technocracy still gets the headlines. If you know one, you're fortunate. If you're reading this, you now know two, and that is good news.

Small Business Marketing - Has Anything Changed?

The Internet is encouraging small businesses to rethink how they market. Traditionally, a simple numbers game has kept them from being able to match larger rivals’ marketing budgets: Small Company X can only afford so much market research and advertising while Big Company Y can afford 10x more.

But on the Internet, small business dollars become far more powerful. For one thing, a small company enjoys the same potential audience as a far larger company. The large company’s dollar carries no more weight in that regard than the small company’s.

More importantly, those dollars can do double duty. The same dollars that you would use to support electronic marketing are also the same ones you would use to create an internal sales force.

Say a one- or three-time print ad in a consumer publication costs you $5,000 to $10,000. For the same investment, you can set up an online electronic catalog sales and order-taking department that runs all day, every day. While there are indirect ways of measuring the effectiveness of a print ad, the measure of an online store's effectiveness is simple: each order is direct revenue, easily counted and instantly available as cash flow.

So rather than using advertising and print material to drive customers to pay attention first, then buy later, you make the more strategic move of using some of those print dollars for electronic marketing, with its potential for immediate return at not much more expense.

The concept of low-cost Internet marketing doubling as internal sales desks is where CBC comes in. We can help "migrate" a small business from being a non-intensive marketing company to one that seems to market effortlessly, while spending little more than current budget levels allow.

Emergence of Electronic Marketing & Sales Departments - Progressive Web Sites are WebCentric

• Electronic Sales Departments run 24/7 all year for half the cost of an order desk person.
• Dynamic web sites spin off supporting collateral print material at lower costs.
• Marketing alliances increase as partners leverage one another's site.
• Sites with Extranet capability can have sales reps paying the manufacturer instead!

 Look at CBC developed sites       

Leveraging Electronic Marketing for Financing - Electronic Equity Marketing Web Sites

Electronic Equity Marketing Strategy:

• Equity Marketing web sites link to your company's business Web site.
• Your business web site has an online newsletter (E-Mag) that drives traffic to your equity marketing site.
• Equity sites link to popular, Internet investor-oriented web sites.
• Print materials - your offering circular, prospectus or business plan, and web site-coordinated product or service literature - support Electronic Equity Marketing.