The following report provides an overview of the Internet and how businesses, both large and small, are benefiting from establishing a prescience on it by creating a company web site.
1. Fastest Growing Medium in the World
The Internet is the fastest growing marketing and communications medium in the world today. Studies reported that in 1994, the Internet had recorded more than an 80% rate of annual growth. This rate increased in 1995 and the size of the Internet is expected to double every six months starting in 1998! Experts predict that the Internet will grow from about 60 million today to over 200 million consumers online by the year 2005.
2. Global Marketing
Expand your business out of your home town or city into the emerging worldwide market place. You may not be able to make sense of the mail, phone and regulation systems in all your potential international markets, but with a Web page, you can open up a dialogue with international markets as easily as with the company across the street.
3. Level the Playing Field
Only on the Internet can you compete head on with large or Fortune 500 companies. You can implement things faster, provide better service, and have a better understanding of what your target market wants and needs.
4. Reduce Time Spent Answering Requests for Information
By having complete information about your products and services on the Internet, you can drastically reduce the time and expense of helping customers over common problems or even answering questions on what your company offers. How about making forms available to pre qualify for loans, or have your web page display information on that certain product your customer is interested in? All this can be done, simply and quickly, on the Internet.
5. Increase your Professional Image
Your customers will be impressed with your 'forward looking' vision and feel more comfortable about doing business with you.
6. To Create a 24 Hour Service
If you've ever remembered too late or too early to call the opposite coast, you know the hassle. We're not all on the same schedule. Business is worldwide but your office hours aren't. Trying to reach Asia or Europe is even more frustrating. But Web pages serve the client, customer and partner 24 hours a day, seven days a week. No overtime either. It can customize information to match needs and collect important information that will put you ahead of the competition, even before they get into the office.
7. To Stay In Contact With Your Sales Staff
Your employees on the road may need up-to-the-minute information that will help them make the sale or pull together the deal. If you know what that information is, you can keep it posted in complete privacy on the WWW. A quick local phone call can keep your staff supplied with the most detailed information, without long distance phone bills and tying up the staff at the home office.
8. Generate Public Interest
You won't get Newsweek magazine to write up your local store opening, but you might get them to write up your Web Page address if it is something new and interesting. Even if Newsweek would write about your local store opening, you wouldn't benefit from someone in a distant city reading about it, unless of course, they were coming to your town sometime soon. With Web page information, anybody anywhere who can access the Web and hears about you is a potential visitor to your Web site and a potential customer for your information there.
9. Slash Your Printing and Postage Costs!
Designing, printing, and mailing brochures or catalogs is very expensive. Sometimes, information changes before it even gets off the press. Now you have a pile of expensive, worthless paper. Adding new products to it throughout the year is prohibitively expensive. Electronic publishing changes with your needs. No paper, no ink, no printer's bill.
The Internet also allows you to get your message to tens of thousands of interested people. You can modify your catalogs daily or hourly, you can send your message through email to thousands absolutely FREE!
11. Solicit Feedback from Your Customers
You pass out brochures, catalogs, and advertise locally. But it doesn't work. No sales, no calls, no leads. What went wrong? Wrong color, wrong price, wrong market? Keep testing, the marketing books say, and you'll eventually find out went wrong. That's great for the big boys with deep pockets, but who's paying the bills? You are and you don't have the time nor the money to wait for the answer. With a Web page, you can ask for feedback and get it instantaneously with no extra cost. An instant e-mail response can be built into Web pages and can get the answer while its fresh in your customers mind, without the cost and lack of response of business reply mail.
12. Target a Specialized Market
Sell fish tanks, art reproductions, flying lessons? You may think that the Internet is not a good place to be. Well, think again. The Internet isn't just computer science students anymore. With the 60 million and growing users of the WWW, even the most narrowly defined interest group will be represented in large numbers. Since the Web has several very good search programs, your interest group will be able to find you. Or your competitors.
13. Better Serve Your Local Market
We've talked about the power to serve the world with a Web page. How about your neighborhood? If you are located in San Francisco Bay Area, the Raleigh NC area, Boston or New York, there is probably enough local customers with Web access to make it worth your while to consider Web marketing. A local Palo Alto, CA restaurant even takes lunch orders through the Internet! But no matter where you are, if the big client has Web access, you should be there too.
14. Reach the Type of Customers Your Business is Looking For
Study after study confirms that the people who use online services and the Internet have the most education and a large disposable income. Internet users are probably the highest mass-market demographic available. Usually college-educated or being college educated, making a high salary or soon to make a high salary, it's no wonder that Wired magazine, the magazine of choice to the Internet community, has no problem getting Lexus and other high-end marketer's advertising.
15. Post Job Opportunities and Recruit Great Employees
Finding good help is often the HARDEST part of running a successful business. Use the Internet to find the best and brightest!
16. Stay Ahead of Your Competition
Your competition is either on the Internet or looking at getting on, so you need to establish a presence or risk being "left behind in the dust."
17. Increase Sales!
With over 70 million + people on the Internet and almost all people visiting your web page will have found it by specifically LOOKING for information about your product or service, you will sell a much higher percentage of them.
Bottom Line
With the Internet virtually doubling every year and businesses of all sizes getting connected worldwide, companies can't afford not to be connected. Once you're connected you'll wonder how you ever ran your business without it!
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