I sometimes wonder why businesses spend the time and money to mail marketing materials addressed to RESIDENT? In most cases, those marketing materials go directly into the trash without being looked at. When you stop to think about it, so many marketing pieces we receive through the mail and internet are very impersonal and that impacts our response to it.

I do a lot of internet research using search engines. I come across a lot of web sites and web pages that are impersonal and boring. They may contain the information I'm looking for. However, they do a poor job of capturing and holding my attention. Just imagine how much more effective marketing strategies would be if they made effective use of personalization?

Internet marketing challenges include: (1) getting your marketing message to the prospect, (2) getting the prospect to listen to your whole marketing message, and (3) getting the response you're looking for.

Getting Your Marketing Message To The Prospect

Advertising, Website promotion, keyword selection, and search engine optimization play a key role in getting your marketing message in front of a prospect. This is an important subject covered widely in magazines, books, websites, and online articles. Therefore, we'll not cover that here. However, it's important to realize you don't make a sale by simply getting the message to the prospect.

Capturing And Holding The Prospects Attention Is A Must

A marketing message that opens with a personalized greeting in the name of the prospect is more likely to get additional attention. In many cases you don't know the name of the person. In some cases you do or you could with a little research. A good database driven marketing tool with interactive features can help you to maximize the power of personalization and help you uncover more names in the communication process. For example, the use of a pass-along-to-a-friend feature provides more exposure to your marketing message and it provides information about the other people that are receiving your message. Some of the new internet broadcast online marketing tools offer these features.

Personalization will get your prospect into your marketing message. However, you still have to capture and hold the prospect's attention. If they don't hear and understand your whole marketing message, your internet marketing strategy won't produce results. The factors that contribute to capturing and holding the prospect's attention are:

• Short: Your marketing message must be limited to 1 to 3 minutes. Shorter is better. Decision makers won’t take the time to consider lengthy marketing messages.
  
• A prospect needs to be entertained, inspired, provoked, and engaged.
  
• Listening, watching, interacting, and reading produce far greater levels of understanding and recall than reading alone.
  
• Communication directed to both the eyes and ears is 68% more effective than communication directed to the eyes alone.

Internet broadcasting is designed to integrate all of the factors above.

Getting The Decision Maker To Take Action

Regardless of the nature of your marketing message, there is always an action you'd like the prospect to take. In many cases, the prospect isn't ready to take the action you desire. They may want to contact you or your staff to get answers to their questions.

As mentioned earlier, some internet marketing online tools offer real time personalization. For example, instant phone messaging gives you or your marketing representative the ability to receive a call, get the name of the caller, and key the name of the caller into your internet broadcast. The broadcast software will quickly and automatically personalize the broadcast, generate a custom URL for that caller, and return that custom URL to you while you're still on the phone with the caller. This process should take less than 30 seconds. Ask the caller to enter that URL on their internet browser. Both you and the caller can be online at the same time watching your internet broadcast. The caller (i.e. prospect) will be impressed by the fact that your broadcast opens with a personal greeting in their name. Since the broadcast is reasonably short, you can communicate with the caller regarding their questions and the key points they are seeing in your broadcast.

Personalization features like instant phone messaging provide a tremendous advantage when communicating your marketing message. This provides you with a competitive edge and will ultimately result in many prospects taking the action you desire.

To see examples of internet marketing online solutions that incorporate the features discussed above, click on online business websites.