Sep 02 2008
Local Economic Updates and New Rules
In November 2007, Ipswich was named the world’s most livable mid-size city. In their latest newsletter Ipswich Mayor Paul Pisasale says:
Among the many announcements made as part of the Ipswich City Council Budget for 2008-2009 was a commitment to further embrace technology to market our city online. Ipswich needs to move with the times and develop new ways to market our city and its attractions on the world wide web.
The new rules to market your business online:
- Develop a site personality; stay tuned in with your customers. As customers start to rely on you for useful information and trust your opinion, a website can evoke a familiar and trusted voice, like that of a friend. This doesn’t happen overnight of course, but over time with constant engagement as you are listening to the language used in your market.
- Include Interactive Content tools, Anything that allows guests and clients to get involved. Examples are posting latest content, popular content, poll to rate your site, industry events calendars. Interactive content encourages guests to explore and more likely to progress through the sales consideration cycle.
- Make feedback loops available, Valuable feedback can be captured through easy and authentic “Contact us” forms, online forums, areas for customer reviews, live chat and ticketing systems.
- Photo’s and images tell your story, It is not all about the words, photo’s, video clips, charts, graphs, statistics, google maps all touch guests in a different way.
- Open Source CRM, An essential item for all online business to track, measure and tweak any marketing or customer activity. Take the client information out of your head, inbox, message bank and file it into the online CRM, it will all be there whenever you need it, wherever you may be.
Remember, on the web, you are what you publish.
According to the latest Australian Social Trends report from the Australian Bureau of Statistics:
The internet is an essential business tool and is rapidly becoming the primary source of information for people of all ages. In fact, the number of households with access to the internet has soared from 16 per cent in 1998 to 64 per cent in 2006-07