Published August 2001

Small businesses ‘buddy up’ to beef up bottom line

By Debra Malmos
Columnist

With news about some Internet companies spending millions on corporate marketing campaigns while touting the Web’s global reach, it’s easy to understand why many small businesses think using the Internet for promotion is effectively impossible. That has never been less true.

Local and community marketing is now, and always has been, the hidden strength of the Internet, and especially the Web. The Web makes collaboration more profitable than competition, making the most of community partnerships and developing new friendships.

All over the world, local businesses have been using the Internet to develop and expand their markets, keeping contact with their customers and finding new ones by collaborating with other complementary companies in their local area. In a way, it’s word-of-mouth marketing — but what a mouth!

Teaming up can generate bottom-line results through expanded visibility, increased accessibility and target marketing.

For example, a collaborative marketing campaign developed this summer by GreenBank Productions, an “on-land and online” promotion company, brings together Trattoria Giuseppe, a fine-dining Italian restaurant; Guest House Log Cottages, a famous honeymoon destination; and Liberty Limousines to cross-promote a Romantic Island Getaway Weekend. They are cross-promoting online, effectively tripling their visibility through shared Web-site traffic.

Additionally, by advertising their businesses and Web sites through widely distributed Northwest Tourism Maps, they have used nontraditional print media at a relatively small cost to reach the eyes of millions of tourists traveling through Pacific Northwest destinations.

These kinds of successes don’t get reported. Other than their expanding customer base, and their increasingly close-knit and loyal customers, no one knows about them — unless they want to, and if they want to, they’ll find them.

Sound Styles, an Edmonds boutique catering to local travelers, has for years encouraged its customers to bring back pictures of their travels, dressed in the clothing they purchased at the store.

Now, Sound Styles’ customers are featured on the company’s Web site with their pictures and travel stories. Incorporating an online gift-certificate program has meant that visitors sent to the site by customers happy to be “on the Web” know exactly what to buy their friends for birthdays and holidays.

The Internet has always been the most intensely personal communication medium. Community building is what the Net has always been about.

Your most successful marketing partner may be your next-door neighbor. Maybe you should say hello.

Debra L. Malmos is President and CEO of iFULL Enterprises, an Internet services provider for access and hosting, Web site development and Internet marketing. She can be reached by phone at 360-321-6242. Her Web site is www.ifull.com.

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