Branding and Positioning

Pay-per-click advertisements on major search engines, direct mail and e-mail campaigns, trade journal advertisements, or e-newsletters to customers and targeted potential customers would be a way for ABC to create a powerful brand awareness campaign, while positioning itself in key areas where potential customers are most likely to find it and become a qualified lead. Next, ABC must look at its internal realties. That is to say, it must ask itself key fundamental questions regarding the way it does business internally and what connections it must make on the outside to secure competitive advantages in the future.

Internal Realities

ABC must answer many questions about its internal realities. It must answer how it plans to integrate Internet leads into its CRM program. It must also answer how it plans on tracking these leads into profits once they are entered into the back-office accounting system. Some companies combine the two systems into what is known as an ERP or enterprise resource planning system. Some companies take it a step further and add trends analysis information and other information into one central database called a knowledge management system.

Sizing Up the Competition

ABC must answer what it means to be a customer-focused company. It must answer questions regarding product pricing, placement, inventory, distribution, competition analysis and ethical concerns such as security and privacy issues. One point to keep in mind when studying the competition is to pay close attention to how the competitor structures its products and services while analyzing the following areas of the competition:

• Technical
• Sales
• Distribution
• Manufacturing
• Marketing
• Financial
• Legal

This information should be used to plan for the future with ones' competition in mind. Relationship analysis effectively drives more intelligence into strategic decision making, which will give one’s company a competitive edge. Understanding how one’s competitors relate to and work with other organizations provides a more accurate picture of one’s competitive landscape. Finally, ABC needs to measure the effectiveness of its efforts and answer whether or not it accomplished its strategic goals.

Critical Steps for Success

There is a theory when it comes to implementing a successful project and that theory maintains that there are four (4) critical areas of any project:

• Time Frame
• Quality
• Scope and
• Budget

The first step that ABC should take is to move towards standardizing its procedures in order to increase efficiencies and decrease costs and the likelihood for errors. Another major step in the process is for ABC to establish a detailed disaster recovery plan. If a majority of its customers are self-servicing themselves, and if new customers are ordering or looking for the first time, the site must be up and functional all of the time. A disaster action plan and team should be put into place in order to assure that ABC’s site remains online and functional 99% of the time.

Further, ABC should market itself on horizontally and vertically integrated marketplaces. Lastly, the sales and customer service force should be trained on the implications of the website. They should understand how to use the site and be aware that any time-savings that the site affords them should be used to gain new leads and sales and to grow sales among the current customer list. In these ways, ABC’s strategic plan can have a direct impact on business and customer relationships. After this has been accomplished, the focus should turn to developing a marketing strategy that incorporates ABC’s goals.

For ABC to create a successful e-business marketing strategy, it must answer some fundamental questions regarding its business practices, external obstacles and long-term strategic vision. Among the most intrinsic questions for ABC to answer are its marketing strategy, internal realties, effective measurement of benchmarks and its overall branding and positioning strategy. Each one of these questions can be broken down into more detailed and insightful questions for ABC to answer.

In our next discussion, we will turn to the topic of marketing strategy.

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