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Wordbnd.com - It is a well known axiom of doing business in any industry that those who do not stay in step with the times will be those companies that eventually die out. There is no place where that truism is more evident than in the way that companies in virtually every business sector are finding to integrate an internet marketing strategy with their traditional communications and to provide the public with an internet “presence” to supplement their public profiles in other venues.
Of course, the value of the internet for sales and promotions has been well known in the industries that service the youth markets and for the companies dealing with entertainment and the arts. Because the internet is in virtually every home and even now on hand held devices of every description, the access it gives to reach a target market are phenomenal.
This explosion of an entirely new marketing model has introduced the world of business to entirely new paradigms of marketing and new ways to achieve greater market penetration and sales. And so any business who has had to get out on cyberspace to keep up with the competition has already had to learn a whole new vocabulary that has grown up around the internet marketing phenomenon. Now terms like “Search Engine Optimization”, “Auto responders” and “Viral Marketing” become important and powerful tools to any business that wants to tap the power of the internet to increase sales.
The second wave of businesses that, perhaps reluctantly,
ventured out into cyberspace were traditional retail business that you would
not associate with cyberspace at all.
This includes sport teams, restaurants and even retail giants such as
Wal-Mart and Border’s Book Stores. In
fact, the wave of change in how products and services are sold has been so
rapid that entire market niches have been virtually revolutionalized by
internet sales techniques. Book and
music outlets have been virtually hard hit as a large percentage of their
customers have abandoned the “brick and mortar” sales outlets entirely to use
the more convenient tools of internet shopping.
This has made it tough on some retailers to keep up. For the “mom and pop” business, the change
has been particularly devastating.
Already small, home grown businesses were struggling to compete with the
giant mega-stores like Wal-Mart to keep their loyal clientele coming back. Add to that the migration of customers to the
internet and the need for change just to stay in business became even more
urgent.
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But even businesses who do not depend on marketing at all
have seen the need to build and maintain a well functioning business web site
so they will have a “face” in cyberspace.
In the modern marketplace, the consumer will go to the internet first to
find out about a company and it’s goods and services. This has turned traditional ways of
connecting with existing and new customers upside down entirely.
The good news is that these rapid changes in how modern
markets work have made the business world more diverse, more able to adjust to
changing business dynamics and more open to the creative and innovative minds
that have always been the real life blood of the business world. And, ironically, it is often the small
business that is most capable of making rapid changes to its online presence
and ways to doing things.
In that the internet is a phenomenally dynamic place, new
ways of reaching our customers change almost annually. Where one year a simple web page may have
been sufficient, soon we had to have chat rooms, MySpace pages and YouTube
compatibility. Any business that sees
these changes as chances to do something new and exciting with their business
will be the companies that thrive in this modern world. And, as always, those who do not thrive with
change will be destined to be made obsolete by it.