I have an online tea company, and I was wondering what marketing tips ya'll can share.

We mostly use google adwords now, but there has to be something else we can do to spread the word. We are working on an affiliate program. I'm debating on running print ads again.

Anyone have a product company that sold primarily online? What did you do?

thanks for the input!

We have had success from defining our target audience and working out how to advertise to THEM. Just becuase you are selling online, doesn't mean you need to only advertise online.

One thing that seems commonly overlooked also is search engine optimisation - if you know what people are searching for online you can also reach them by making sure your site is highly ranked. I would *guess* online tea is not as competative as say, the web hosting business (*grin*), so you should be able to get some good results with a little time & patience.


Having said that, some folks have had very good results from adwords and the like, the key is to keep a very tight track on results and continuosly adjust your technique to optimise your results. Besides Pay Per Click (PPC) techniques you can look at other techniques e.g. affiliates, ezines etc etc

Just my 2cents

Hi,

Below is a listing from Overture's suggestion tool on the type on nuber of searches for tea in the month of july over their network.

http://inventory.overture.com/d/sear...ry/suggestion/

Try search engine listing as mentioned above. Pay per click search engines. Quality link exchanges (avoid link farms) with websites that get higher traffic than you. Your future affiliate program will help you get websites to push traffic.

I would suggest a "Tea Club" promotion where you market in the real world for new customers and maintain them through your web site (and expand on their business as well). You have some interesting marketing hooks as well -- probably the most interesting is designing your own blend of tea.

Explore the possiblity of going direct to the consumer to gain new customers. Two options come to mind -- television and print direct response advertising. Have you seen the ad for that coffee Klava? Cleva? (sic) names escapes me at the moment, on television. The promotion is a free coffee maker and two months of coffee and a monthly we'll send you an order every month on going program. Sort of like book of the month club.

We offer services in both TV and print direct response. I would invite you to check out the information on our site on direct response advertising. We offer a fee free first consultation service and invite you to make contact.

I can't help but have graphic visions of all the short vignettes that could sell your product. Here's one -- Young adult couple on balcony overlooking old European town at sunset, they're sharing a cup of hot tea. She takes a sip and the look of desire crosses her face from her enjoyment of the taste. "What blend of tea is this?" she murmurers. "Your's of course my dear", he says in a British accent. Camera pulls back as cup falls and breaks on the ground they embrace, camera pushes past to your logo. Well you get the idea.

While promoting your business by ads in magazines or spots in TV can sound cool, let's remember that sometimes budgets will not fit. There is a popular idea that with online companies, you can simply cut a lot of expenses. While this is, in a part, somehow true, there are still of variables that must be considered, for any type of business.

bvwh is right. Just because you sell online, it doesn't mean you must advertise exclusively online. Similar companies that followed that procedure in the past, are now gone with the wind.

I will share some low-cost online and offline strategies that can help your business.

1. PR (Public Relations). Media Coverage

Try to find an unique side of your business, a story that could be of interest for somebody, specially, journalists. Try contacting radio and TV stations, newspapers, magazines. Try to get a hold of people that do business interviews/articles/notes. And have it published. (Find a way, be creative).

2. PR: Conventions / Congresses / Meetings

Try assisting to International Congresses related to your business. I know it could be quite expensive to go to another country, or worse, investing for having a stand. You can reduce the spectrum, to a local target. While this will not boost your sales internationally, the idea is to make business contacts. You never know if you are going to meet future investor, business partner, or strategic partner. Making good connections, always helps your company.

3. SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

While this can be quite costly (slow, and uneffective), investing a bit in traditional advertisement can be more direct and profitable.

HOWEVER, if SEO is done correctly, and with a low *cough* price cost, it can help your company to boost sales. The idea is to pick keywords that are not used by search engine experts, and to select unique and valuable keywords that your potential buyers will use in their searches. That way, you can easily gain a market that is not so well covered.

Online marketing is highly over-rated. Everyone exaggerates their success. I use Adwords but its performance is decling as too many junk advertisers enter the program. By junk advertisers I mean companies which bid against you on your keywords but offer a completely unrelated product or service.

To succeed you really need to do a lot of real world marketing.

The question is not what did I do, but what I am doing. One can not do promoting once and then forget about it. You have to do it on constant basis.

Given, I am not were I want to be yet (I only really started selling online about 9-10 month ago), but I am constantly learning how I can promote more effectively.

So far the BIGGEST thing I say is SEO (Search Engine Optimization). I am already doing good in Yahoo on most of my key phrases. Still not so good in Google.

I am currently working on getting more links to my site from others who want to "trade", 'cuz it's said to be "good for Google ranking"

I personally don't think online marketing is overrated, especially for online only businesses. This is exactly where your potential customers are - online!

Define online with something besides "online". Likely you won't be able to because it isn't contained restrained or predictable. Don't believe me? Just six months ago nobody knew what a BLOG was? I've been online since day one (by the way that's only a few years) and have witnesses the incredible growth the Internet has gone through. Along with it has come at attitude that some how the eworld is different, one doesn't operate the same in the real world as in the eworld, eworld is somehow better than real world especially for those business wanna bes that couldn't start a real world business if they were paid to, and while growing at phenomenal rates the online is still a community.

Here's a couple of things to make my point. I started using search engines when they were invented. They worked very well. I did a land office (pardon the real world term) business on the Internet. I had high rankings and my hits grew tremendously. I'm not selling a product, but rather a service. The cost was absolutely nothing but my time.

A couple of years ago I rearrangement my web stuff so that my site was hosted by one company and the majority of memory for pictures, video clips, clips of television programs etc. was stores in my free memory along with my ISP account. Work great until my ISP started making changes like crazy, then sold out, then they sold out again, etc., any way the short of it was that with the forced disappearance of a ton of links to URL's stored somewhere else, I hit the shxt list real fast. Unfortunately I then lost my main URL address to the same malady.

My web hits went to nothing of course. I had to recover. To recreate what I had done just a few years before just by investing my time, now requires more of my time and approximately $2,000 to $2,500 per month! I'm a small business and I have yet to recover. Yes I screwed up by not maintaining a single URL for my domain name. You know what's odd though -- I still get emails from people that have somehow accessed the first site I put up in the 1994! I can't even do that!

Have you thought about email marketing? I use EMPACT, which you can find at www.murgent.com. That's the company that provides the service, and I think it's great. I've been using it for about six months to marketing the online portion of my book store and customers are really responding to it. You have to collect email addresses yourself, so I would reccommend asking for permission to use it again when your customers enter it on your shopping cart page. I have had no trouble gathering emails from customers. Each month I send out a newsletter and usually some sort of promotion or coupon. You could send out announcements about new teas that you have, or perhaps a 10% off your next purchase coupon.

Keep in mind that there are 2 unique forms of marketing that can be done by anyone. These are Passive Marketing and Active Marketing.

Passive Marketing is what most start-up businesses do because it seems the most logical to them and because it is all they know. Passive marketing is where you place an ad or flyer or listing somewhere in hopes a prospect sees it and answers to it and responds back to you.

Active Marketing is where YOU are in total and complete control of the marketing and sales process at all times. It is a marketing concept where you go after and ACTIVELY seek your target market and you land the clients through a complete process of relationship building etc.

Passive marketing can only work so far, but active marketing will get you much better results if your willing to put forth the effort.

Let me know if I can or should go into more details.