Websites and Marketing Make a Great Team

In musical theatre, most actors create websites to promote themselves to agents, casting directors, etc. On these sites, performers can put their headshots, resume, pictures, and videos of their performances.  I have talked to many professional actors who have gotten majority of work through their website.  In our generation, the internet is where the prime source of income lies.

Real-time Marketing PR has a chapter (14) on "How Your Website Becomes a Real-Time Marketing Machine."  According to the book, we are now "entering a fifth era of the evolution: transformation of the web site into a real-time marketing (and sales) machine.  This is the natural evolution of a process that started with a new way to slip brochures under people's doors" (179).

Over the years, society has gotten spoiled over how easily we can get things at the precise time that we want them.  This is why businesses find so much success when online.  This also increases the expectations for customers.  People are much less willing to wait in line anymore because they have the purchasing power at their fingertips.

But what happens when your business is too busy to respond to individual customers?  This is where automation comes into play.  Customers do not want to wait hours or days to get a response from businesses.  This is how businesses can respond to customers quickly and easily.  However, the automation should not just be some impersonal, frustrating auto-responders that "follow-up" canned email messages.  The automative messages need to be effective and off information or contact request forms to customers.

Michael Chertudi, vice president of demand marketing at Omniture, an online marketing and Web analytics business unit of Adobe, says the automation process should collect two important pieces of information.  "Knowing the actual place on your site where the person expressed his or her interest allows you to reply in context.  Similarly, it's important to know the nature of the offer that interested the potential buyer" (181).

Responding to customers in real-time is a great determinant of why customers use certain businesses. The main point of this book is to express how important it is to connect with customers and grow your business in real-time.