Why would you want to get inspiration from corporate marketing methods for your internet marketing efforts? Quite simply, they work. Without reaching out to prospective buyers regularly, a corporation will not be able to generate revenue and will not be able to sustain itself. Promoting a product is just as important for internet marketers as it is for their corporate counterparts, even though the internet marketer will likely be working on a smaller scale.

Three Components to Marketing

Corporations know that their marketing efforts can be broken down into three distinct components:

• Finding customers
• Satisfying the customers’ needs
• Keeping customers

Finding customers, or prospecting, is the most challenging part of this process. For that reason, your internet marketing efforts should be focused on spreading the word about your business all the time. This is not something you can do once, or even for a short time, and then stop. To keep customers moving through to the second and third stages of the process, you will need to make sure that you have a steady stream of prospects.

Once a prospect has turned into a customer, your focus will shift to ensuring that his or her needs are met by offering the right products. To make sure you are making the right offer to your customer base, you will need to be well versed in the type of problem your customer is trying to solve. Corporations conduct marketing studies to get to know their client base, and you can do the same by inviting feedback and conducting surveys.

Keeping a customer is a lot easier than prospecting for new ones, so you will want to take steps to encourage your customers to buy from you more than once. Offer discounts on future purchases in return for filling out a customer satisfaction survey. Most people who are not happy with their purchase won’t say anything; they will simply move on to a different provider.

Corporations know that their marketing efforts don’t stop when a customer decides to make a purchase. Offering good service after the sale is just as important as getting the prospect to open up his or her wallet in the first place.

Sell Your Customers on the Value of Your Product

A customer will make a decision about whether to buy a product based on its value. When corporations are marketing their products, they provide information to customers about the item’s features (what it does) and benefits (how it can help the consumer). A customer will make a choice between two items by evaluating whether the benefits justify the cost. If the customer can justify the cost of the item by the level of benefit it offers, it will be much easier to make a sale.

The suggestions listed above are examples of how to use corporate marketing for internet marketing inspiration. The two types of business models are not as different as they may have appeared at first glance.