The internet is absolutely flooded with companies these days, many of whom are all selling the same products and services to the same markets that they were a decade ago with traditional marketing techniques, things have moved on somewhat and trading (or at least generating leads) on the internet has not only opened up a whole new base of suppliers to the customers, but also a new base of customers to the suppliers. It’s about time that companies started to see this as a new opportunity, not just an extension of their original marketing strategies.

Lets take an example of a company who were traditionally selling bookings software to tourism companies and are based in Swindon UK. Many years ago they might send out flyers and brochures, then follow up with a call, then a software demonstration and hopefully get the business, they would probably get some consultancy work and an ongoing support contract out of it too. Because of the number of site visits which might be required, they would probably only market to companies in Wiltshire and the surrounding counties.

Nowadays they can market to the whole country, this can easily be done online, pretty much any company large or small already has a website, I’m not saying it’s a good website, I’ve seen some really bad ones recently myself, but they have a presence on the internet, which is a good start. The problem is many companies see this in the same way that they used to see a brochure, i.e. it’s there to point people to, wrong! It should be there to be found in the search engines by your entire market and a whole new one, after all, why only market to Wiltshire now, you can also target the Midlands and Scotland just as easily too, if your website is optimised for Google, if someone finds it, great they are a potential customer, because they were online looking for your products, so beyond your fixed overheads of hosting, domain registration, design and any search engine marketing, those leads are coming to you free of charge.

Combine all this with the fact that a lot of sales are now done in online demonstrations, so there is no need to drive up and down the country to do them, your cost of sale has just plummeted, then consider that large ammounts of consultancy and support may be able to be delivered on the internet and you can see how the market has just opened up to you.  Fantastic!

Or is it?

Remember, that all those competitors are thinking the same way! they may be ahead of you and already have the top positions on search engines, or they may be close behind and possibly have a larger budget for seo and online marketing, so what do you do?

This is where becoming niche really comes into play. Remember that our example company are in Swindon, Wiltshire and operating selling tourism software, with supporting services and training.  Obviously they want to retain the local business as being local is to some degree, a niche in itself.  However rather than only having the local companies to supply, they can sell nationally now, or possibly even internationally, so the software can be customised for specific niches, so within that tourism bracket it may be that there is a module for the hotel bookings sector, another for holiday camp management etc, so by becoming even more specific they can really start to clean up.

There’s more information on Swindon in Wiltshire, or the tourist or software industries, and general information about specialist industries and seo here.