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Now that we understand a few of the differences that make the web a unique medium, let's hurry up and design a site to start your business promotion. We can put up all this information about your products and services and then put this calculator application on there so people figure out what the square root of 12 is right there on-line. Management will be ecstatic, business will increase, and the site will become a national posterchild for interesting concepts. Whoa there. Let's slow down a bit before making the second largest web mistake -- not recognizing and implementing fundamental marketing theories.
Yes, I know I said that you cannot design and promote a web site like other traditional mediums, but that doesn't mean that certain theories fail to hold. It simply means that they may need to be modified a little to fit this new medium. It is extremely important that you have an understanding of some basic marketing principals that not only assist in refining your outlook for web potential, but give your web site a strong marketing foundation.
If you have ever taken a marketing class in your life, I guarantee that you have been exposed in some form to the four P's -- product, price, place, and promotion. Now don't go reaching for that power switch yet. Most likely, you've been lectured on the generic, boring, four P's -- the ones that seem to cross all mediums and boundaries. Unfortunately, the web doesn't work like this and neither does business. Therefore, I want to give these elements a new twist and offer specific examples on how various implementations of these elements improve business and marketing on the web. In fact, I will awe and amaze you by proposing that there is actually a fifth ``P" -- positioning -- which is arguably the most important in web marketing. |
