Ask Questions 
Share Tips 
List Your Business 
Coffee Talk with Experts 
Biz Planning | Sample Plans 
Idea 
Name 
$ 
Do It! 
Promotional Merchandise
Managing | Operations
Work @ Home 
Yoga @ Your Desk 
|
|
Expert Answers to Biz Questions
Listen in! Pick up some expert advice to a reader's question that we selected from CyberSchmooz.
The Biz Question
My partner and I are going online with our T-shirt company. Our age demographic is between 14 and 29. Our products tend to appeal to kids involved in skateboarding, comic books and that type of thing.
We were thinking of posting a marketing survey to related newsgroups, to indirectly promote our company and to feel out our potential customers. We plan to have a giveaway for anyone who fills out our questionnaire.
How can we word our posts so they don't look like spam and so that we get responses to our marketing survey??
Any ideas would be very much appreciated...
Andrea
Answer from our Guest Expert Jim Chesky of Jim Chesky & Associates, Marketing Communications
Andrea:
I like what you're proposing. An on-line T-shirt company sounds like a tasty endeavor. It's the kind of idea that can do well on the web. Also, I like using newsgroups to promote your biz. It's a great place to do market research. However, this marketing dish can be a sticky wicket. So prepare your postings carefully. Just as all mass, non-requested commercial mailings are called junk mail in the snail-mail world, mass, indiscriminate commercial postings are considered spam online.
No Matter How Mom Cooked It -- It Was Still Spam!
I came from a large family, and my mother needed to make every dollar stretch. So, she bought the canned meat product -- Spam. It was not our favorite thing. And Mom was extra creative in preparing the Spam. She'd mix and mince it, cover it, coat it and cook it a hundred different ways. But in the end, it was still Spam.
Moral of the Story: No matter how you write an intrusive commercial message for a newsgroup, unless the message is germane to the newsgroup discussion, it's spam (the non-meat variety). So here are some tricks of the trade to avoid the spam pitfall.
Send Out An Invitation First and Deliver The Beef!
Make sure your posting is relevant to the newsgroup. There's a way to serve this up without upsetting anybody's stomach -- and maybe even make your website a place for your target market to hang out to boot. Start by inviting people to your website in a manner that's appropriate for the newsgroup.
Let's say the newsgroup is a skateboard group. You could invite readers to vote for their favorite board, skate boarder (male and female), or whatever seems be the hot topic du jour. And mention your offer of prizes for those who vote. Make it worth while for them to visit your site. Place a hot link in your posting (no cookies please) that takes them to a survey page. Add your own questions to the survey.
Now, you have a legitimate reason to re-post. You can then update the newsgroup with the results as they are tallied. This could be done daily if the newsgroup supports that much traffic. Each report on the survey results includes an invitation for the readers to add their vote, and maybe win your prize offerings. Do a different survey page for each newsgroup with hot links to the T-shirt end of your site.
Later, depending on how successful you are and how much money you want to sink into your site, you could add a chat room, with your home page as the portal to the chat room. Each day, the subject is what interests one of the target newsgroups. Again, you have a legitimate reason to post.
Give Them 100% USDA-Approved Meat -- Not Spam!
The key here is to write and send each post individually. Time-consuming, yes, but remember you're trying to cook up a successful web enterprise. Mass, indiscriminate postings to many newsgroups is the same as sending out 10,000 pieces of mail, all addressed to "Occupant."
Good luck with your business, and keep us posted.
Jim Chesky of Jim Chesky & Associates, Marketing Communications
Have a biz question of your own? Go post it in CyberSchmooz
Meet the Experts
|
|
Small Business Tax Center • Idea Cafe Home • Sign Up • Biz Grant Center • CyberSchmooz •Coffee Talk with Experts • People in Biz Profiles • Starting Your Biz • Biz Planning • Running Your Biz • FREE Trade Publications • Marketing • Financing Your Biz • Human Resources • Legal & Biz Forms • Managing Your Biz • eCommerce • You and Your Biz • Gen X • Work@Home • The Fridge • De-Stress • Send an Award • Send an eGreeting • Yoga @ Your Desk • Web Guide • Idea Cafe in the News • About Idea Cafe • Advertise on Idea Cafe • Contact Us • Privacy Policy • Site Map • Small Biz News
Copyright 1995-2023, Idea Cafe Inc. Downloads are for personal use only, not for resale to others, and may not be reprinted in any form without written permission from Idea Cafe Inc. DISCLAIMER: We hope whatever you find on this site is helpful, but be cautioned that it may not apply to your own situation, or be totally current at any given time. Idea Cafe Inc. and all of its current and past experts, sponsors, advertisers, agents, contractors and advisors disclaim all warranties with regard to anything found anywhere on this family of websites, quoted from, or sent from Idea Cafe. and its related sites, publications and companies. We also take no responsibility for comments published by others on these pages. TRADEMARKS: The following are Registered Trademarks or Servicemarks of DevStart, Inc.: Idea Cafe®, Online Coffee Break®, The Small Business Gathering Place®, Take out Info®, Biz Bar & Grill®, Complaint-O-Meter®, A Fun Approach to Serious Business™, CyberSchmooz™, and BizCafe™.
|
|
|
|