Reading the financial sections these days will make you aware of the potential economic downturn (example: AT&T seeing softness in consumer spending). So if you’re contemplating whether you should establish (or grow) an online marketing budget, please allow me to suggest that your monies should be hoarded until the economic “haze” clears because nothing is better than watching your competitors take market share. In times like these, it is clearly important to be more focused and strategic with your online marketing efforts.

If you sell your products offline, it is time to think about:

• Setting up a shopping cart to allow buyers to learn more and directly order your products.

• Accepting payments online to speed up the collection process and improve your cash flow.

• Using a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system to collect leads or other customer communication and efficiently route them within the organization.

Because eCommerce is a highly matured area on the web, there are actually several affordable/inexpensive solutions that can be easily implemented, and these are great especially if you’re just starting out. But as your business grows, your needs will likely change so you’ll want to give slight consideration to solutions that have more features, can be tailored to your organization or can scale to support more employees (aka users). These solutions will likely require more effort to implement.

If you’re already selling your products online, it is time to add more sophistication to your existing system(s). So, it is time to think about:

• Integrating a Product Review System into your Shopping Cart to enable buyers to better understand the quality of the product.

• Launching an targeted email program that delivers personalized email messages based on a user’s shopping habits, interests or even language preferences (FYI: the next wave of consumers in the US speak/read Spanish).

• Promoting your product offerings within a local search portal or even a mapping service (like Google Maps) to drive more local awareness.

In essence, now is time to get going but not without a strategy. It is simple to go from point A to point B, but only with a strategy can you move forward in a direct line.

RELATED LINKS:

• Hosted Shopping Cart (Ecommerce Web Site by Network Solutions)
• Shopping Cart Software (LaGarde’s Storefront)
• Hosted CRM Solution (SalesForce)
• Google Coupons System