During these times of economic uncertainty, NOW is your opportunity to get in front of your customers and beat your competition! While other companies are cutting marketing and sales budgets to wait and see what happens with the economy, you can use this as an opportunity to grow your business by bringing it online. (See the Kern's Sausages testimonial for an example on how good websites can be very effective at attracting new customers!)

In times of economic stress, there are three things you can do:

1. Lower fixed costs wherever you can. Bring business processes online to cut costs and streamline your business. Almost all types of business processes can be brought online to allow for easier and more cost-effective communication. For example, a Gartner study found that the manual processing of an invoice costs $8.50, while the electronic processing costs only $3.44.
2. Be more reactive to take advantage of any new opportunities. You need a website that allows for easy and quick changes to your products and services while also enabling you to reach new markets across state and national boarders. "70% of U.S. households now use the Internet to find merchants and services," according to research by The Kelsey Group. There are over 1.8 billion e-shoppers and they are going online to find products and services for the workplace and home.
3. Create an environment that builds relationships and allows customers to experience your business. Save your customers both driving time and gas money by providing an interactive and engaging website environment that allows them to visit your office virtually! A McKinsey study found that "70% of companies are using Web 2.0 technologies (like blogs, message boards, contact systems, etc.) to communicate with their customers because they believe it provides a competitive advantage and meets customer demands to help maintain their market position." What are Web 2.0 technologies?

Once you have a site that allows for this level of interactivity, you need to make it easy for people to find your website. This is called search engine optimization. A few tips for Search Engine Optimization (SEO):

1. Identify keywords and key phrases that people use to search for your products and services.
2. Use those keywords in the text of your website.
3. Use image alt tags, meta tags, heading tags and more to optimize your pages as well.

Interested to learn more about SEO and web marketing strategies? Register to attend our Web Marketing Seminar: Blogging, Social Networking, e-Commerce and SEO to gain tips and insight on great cost-saving resources.