finishingcom

The home page of the finishing industry

Did you hear the one about the guy who went to church every day? He would take a seat in the back pew, and silently pray that he would win the lottery. This went on for a year. Then one day, he was all alone in the church. Suddenly, there is a vision, an angel appears before him. Overcome by the sight, (he had recently been reading Dante's Divine Comedy, so he was primed for this) he falls to his knees, shaking. The vision speaks: "Meet me halfway, buy a ticket!"

He made two mistakes:

1. He shouldn't have asked his Maker for material things.

2. He didn't buy a ticket.

What does this have to do with marketing? Just Everything! There are four "P's" to Marketing:

• Price
• Product
• Place
• Promotion

Advertising is a part of promotion and the World Wide Web is a brand new way to advertise.

For an excellent marketing text, see 'Basic Marketing', E. Jerome McCarthy, and William D. Perreault, Jr., Ninth Edition, 1987, Irwin Press, Homewood, IL 60430

There are advantages and disadvantages to promotion on the Web.

• Change on the Web is measured in weeks.

  Other media used by the finishing industry like magazines, phone directories, and registers are relatively static, and will be around for a long while yet. There has been a decline in magazine ad pages for the finishing industry over the last few years, however, and the World Wide Web and other new technologies will mean more competition for advertising dollars. The ability of Website advertising to initiate sales leads is an unknown quantity for many industries but my personal experience (this is a completely unscientific study) has been:

   Paper Media  1 
   Website      3 
   

  That is, in three years of advertising in trade journals, and other paper media, I received one sales lead. In 6 months of Website advertising, I received 3 sales leads. This indicates to me that something is happening on the Internet.

• Barriers to entry (i.e., starting a Webpage for promotion) are very low.

  At the moment, anyone can afford to get a lot of information to a world-wide audience. But who is the audience? And what kind of information should be displayed? Uncertainty abounds, but sometimes you have to take your lumps if you expect to learn anything.

• Compared to other media, it may be hard to find out who is reading your ad.

  In a recent and ongoing study, finishing dot com is attempting to find out what our guests want. The results are not all in yet, but we can report some preliminary conclusions. A note: All surveys are prepared in such a way so that any result merely confirms the suspicions of the surveyor. So when guests to an absolutely free, no-questions-asked web site were asked to respond to a reader's survey, here is what we found:

• YOU STAYED AWAY IN DROVES

  This is a perfect confirmation of our beliefs (another successful survey). So Website managers have to use other methods to find out what their guests want. But it seems clear that an open Website is still the way to go. That means that Website managers have to think of a way to have our cake and eat it. How do we measure the performance of a Website? Well, what we did was to have a Website which targets the market of people interested in related segments of finishing as defined on our Home Page, try to deliver some content, and then...

• Count the hits to each page

  At least we can see where the interest of our guests may be roaming. We can change the site to attract the target audience based on this information and on any other feedback we receive.

• So everything is just fine.

  There is one little problem. You can have the best Website in the world. You can be reaching your target audience. You can be providing a wonderful, interesting new way to do business which has a place alongside the more traditional ways. Your hitting on all eight cylinders, cruising along, when someone asks:

• What kind of fuel do you use to power this thing?

  You see, the fuel you use comes from the people who promote their products on your pages. We know, and they know, that sooner or later, guests will need to purchase something for their business. And the hope is that guests will use the directory that comes with the Website to help in the decision making process. Your target audience is the one that will use the Website's directories to do business.

• The success of a Website is tied to the happiness of it's advertisers

  Advertisers on the Website pay to keep the Website up and running. They are interested in guests who use the directories to make purchasing decisions. They measure the success of their promotion by the amount of sales leads generated and expect a certain return for their investment. They use the Website as another channel for marketing; if the channel doesn't work, they switch channels.

• When guests use the directories, the Website delivers.

  When the Website is useful to advertisers, it can continue to grow and offer more to the guests. It's a vicious or happy cycle, depending on how you look at it. Because the Website manager will change the Website to attract an audience which will sustain the advertisers. A free Website, with all of its advantages (anonymity apparently being one of them), is not free after all.

• The Directory makes the Website possible.

  Guests who use the Website Directories to make buying decisions are supporting the Website in the most eloquent fashion.

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