Ask A Marketer - Marketer Responses: June Li

One Degree’s June Li takes a stab at the submitted Ask A Marketer question, by providing some helpful tips. Her response is below:

1. Marketing questions first – How is your brand different from the the competition? What makes customers more likely to buy from you than your competition? Is your merchandising a point of difference? Your knowledge?
2. Decide what success looks like. Ten more customers who arrive at the store having found your store on the Web?
3. Understand your prospects and customers.
• Do customers really buy furniture on the Web? Or do they look, then go to the store to touch and feel, sit in/on it, etc.?
• If there’s a web special, do some folks look, go to the store and then go home and buy online to get the lower price? [Hey – it happens with books!]
• Do customers buy appliances on the Web? …etc, etc. Is it worth the time and $ to put the products on the site? Don’t forget maintenance. (Just posted this morning on my blog about personas. A different aspect – more about marketing accountability but you might be interested in a short blurb about using personas)
4. How to start? Read Web Redesign 2.0 by Goto and Cotler (Book website) – available from Amazon.ca and Chapters-Indigo.
5. The best analytics software depends on what you need to measure to track and evaluate success. What’s best for one organization can be a disaster for another, even in the same industry. Suggest installing Google Analytics on their existing site now to get some baseline data. If they need help doing this properly so that it gives the meaningful results, contact me.