Pushing your unique difference online

Fifteen years ago, building a website was like buying a brand new motorbike. With the invasion of templates and open source content management system, a modest website can be had for the price of an everyday bicycle. But as I have always mentioned in my past columns, you can’t afford to just wait around for customers to know where you are in the internet. Remember, you are not alone in the internet – it’s a huge and humongous place out there where everybody seems to be begging for attention. You need to get found. You need to stand out and show what you got that you’re not like everybody else. You need to be different to be noticed. That’s basic marketing.

But what if everybody is doing that very same “need to be different” thing that you’re doing? You already have that “killer difference” but your customers are clueless if such killer difference really exists in this planet? While we know how to be unique or point out that highly familiar “unique selling proposition” in our product or service, but we still wrestle with the question as to how or where to pass on that unique attribute straight to our customers’ faces. It’s a tough reality that businesses face everyday in the retail world. That same reality also exists in the web.

For companies who have the money to drop, they may embark easily on traditional advertising to introduce their products. This, of course, is something that small businesses cannot afford. So the only way to get even is to wager on online marketing. However, it’s quite disheartening to find that only a few companies here in Cebu believe or are familiar with online marketing while many of them are still reluctant to even spend on a simple website despite the fact that it’s now really more affordable to own one. There are also those who think that they know how to run an online campaign only to waste their time and effort in the internet without gaining anything. 

Small businesses, especially those that are just starting, need to be educated as to what and how an online marketing is done and how they can benefit from the whole effort. While any business can get into it easily by simply reading, it may be worth considering getting the services of a professional to assess your capacity and resources so you will be guided on what battles to make and the arsenal you need to get you to the competition. Online marketing is the best way for companies to express and flaunt their differential advantage to their markets without straining and draining its marketing budget. The only hitch with marketing online is that it takes a while to get the results.

But online marketing has its distinct advantage over traditional advertising in many ways. It is measurable and you can switch or change campaigns at any given time. Heuristics is another thing that is difficult to implement in traditional campaigns. Online campaigns enable you to employ guerrilla techniques and to test and find the campaigns that work for you and abandon those that do not. In other words, you have the power to experiment until you find the right mix to effectively get your unique selling proposition to your markets. This you cannot do with traditional advertising because of the high cost of production.

Online marketing is sustainable. Once you have established a captive audience all you need is to keep them engaged on a regular basis without trying to appear hard-sell. The beauty of it all is that your markets will also do the marketing for you if your unique selling proposition ticks. Online marketing also gives you the power to interact with your customers. Your customer is your best source of inputs in product development as well as a good source of information about what your competitors are doing. This you cannot do in traditional advertising because of its really very passive nature. 

What makes online marketing even more exciting today is the phenomenal growth of mobile devices that allows companies to push products anywhere at any given time. Thus, the future of online marketing will be configured to serve both PC and mobile platforms. And if you haven’t gone mobile yet, you better start thinking about it. I would like to talk more of these in my next column.

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