April 23, 2007 Small Business Marketing (and The Web) 
Guy Kawasaki recommended Duct Tape Marketing: The World's Most Practical Small Business Marketing Guide along with a distilled top ten list from author John Jantsch. I've gone ahead and ordered the book (yet to read it obviously), but here are a few thoughts on some of the top tips:
Create information that educates. You are in the information business, so think of your marketing materials, web sites, white papers, marketing kits as information products, not "sales" propoganda.
I've never sat down with a client or prospect and not stressed this point. Your web site is not just a catalog, or a contact form, or an "About Us" page. It's a vehicle for you to establish expertise and emerge as a leader, a place where your customers or clients can learn, participate and grow. Allocate time, energy and budget to becoming a content provider, a publisher, a leading voice in your field.
The big brands are doing this: When I worked on sites for the Campbell Soup Company, we worked with the Campbell Kitchen Team to bring the recipes that they produced, tested, and reviewed to life online, driving the Campbell Kitchen web site to #1 Food and Cooking Site in average repeat visitors per month (Nielsen). We worked with Lexmark to not just promote ink discounts in emails, but provide tips and activities for users to engage in using their printer. You can always find something to offer in addition to your core product or service that will keep users returning to your site and interacting with your brand.
Package the experience. Put visual elements around every aspect of the marketing strategy that you adopt. Use design to evoke the appropriate emotional response from your ideal prospect.
Sure you can design your homepage. So could I. I won't. I'm not a designer. I commit my time and energy to thinking about marketing, how to harness technology for the purpose of marketing, and how to execute that technology in optimal accordance with best practices. I wouldn't let you pay me to design your web site, nor would I encourage you to design it yourself (unless you are a designer, of course!).
Web, or Interactive, Designers learn what works in the medium, what users respond to, and what's most effective for both users and your business value. Turn to them and listen to them. The web provides many constraints as much as it does opportunities that need to be acknowledged or put to use.
Generate leads from many points. People learn in different ways. Your lead generation efforts must allow your prospects to experience your firm from many different angles and views.
Including your homepage. An email campaign. Tell-a-friend recommendations or viral campaigns. Print. Online video. RSS. Access for assistive or mobile devices. You want to enable all these different touchpoints for your customers, but you also want a strategic deployment process in place that brings them to the same, single point: Your message, and your database.
This is where smart development and an experienced, expert developer give your business that extra boost. Your web site should rest upon a solid foundation that makes your content findable in search engines, and accessible on multiple platforms.
Nurture leads along the logical buying path. There’s a natural way for your prospects to come to the conclusion that you have what they need. Build the lead conversion system for before, during, and after the sale.
Measure everything that matters. Certain things always matter. The secret sauce is in finding and measuring the intangibles – those things down on the shop floor that eventually add up to profit.
Automate for leverage. Embrace the Internet or else. Create access, stimulate community, capture innovation, and build knowledge to automate the basic delivery elements of your information business.
The web is the most powerful marketing tool we've known to date and has revolutionized marketing practices. No other medium provides the ability to engage so many people in such targeted forums. No other medium provides such capabilities for metrics that can assess effectiveness to inform your future marketing efforts and properly respond to your customers needs.
To fully leverage that power, you need a comprehensive strategy and toolset that tracks your users from start to end: integrating pre-sales, post-sale, ongoing communication and campaigns, support and future engagements. Search optimization, content management that enables custom content delivery during the sales process, demographic segmentation, segmented/targeted email campaigns, brand reinforcement, click-through tracking, and aggregate metrics all work together to not only provide you a full view from the big picture down to the individual customer, but can be used to better provide value to your customer, by learning more about their needs and desires, and delivering an experience tailored just for them. (And it works -- experience shows that targeted content (in the aforementioned Lexmark campaigns) results in higher click-throughs.) Your online marketing partner should be able to tailor that platform for you.
