Page 26 - Duct Tape Marketing

Strategy Before Tactics

See, Zappos or Dell or Amazon can’t really create the engagement
and experience that you can in your high-touch, in-person business.
That’s your competitive advantage. Don’t think about making a sale
online; think about getting a chance to make an impression. The
primary way to do that is to become an online warrior for creating
awareness for your products, services, brand, content, and expertise.
When a local shopper or information gatherer turns to a search engine,
drive that surfer offline for the total package.

Creating customers offline will, in my opinion, always (okay, for
the next few years, anyway) be the most profitable way for a small busi-
ness to build long-term, high-profit revenue. But those revenues will
never appear if you don’t master the online information space first.

The online-to-offline mind-set involves a healthy dose of what
many would refer to as SEO, but its success actually hinges on how
you intend to engage online visitors once you’ve got them. There are
three phases to the development of your fused approach.

1. Discovery: In this phase, you lay the groundwork for under-
standing what your local prospects are looking for and how
you can use this data to create awareness for the products and
services you offer. As an offline business, you have the distinct
advantage of asking your customers, but you must also take
clues from your successfully placed online competitors.

2. Content: Content is a very large and growing concept online, but
here interpret it as educational content creation aimed squarely
at answering the kinds of questions your prospects may have
about your products/services. It also encompasses the liberal use
of outposts for your content in places such as local directories,
social networks, and bookmarking sites that lead paths back to
your primary Web hub.

3. Engagement: This term is tossed around frequently in
social media circles these days, but few things compare to

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