PlusOne - Musings of a marketer

I was having an interesting conversation with a lady who was buying some wages software she had seen featured on our software site. What started out as a phone order soon turned her experiences as a small business owner and how it was possible to successfully run one in a large regional centre of 21,000 people.

This lady runs a secretarial service. All but one of her clients are in her region, and all of the four casual staff live in the local area. New clients are generated from word of mouth.

Our conversation soon came around to the issue of if it was worth having a website. First was the issue of once a website is built, then it has to be found. With her focus on her region, I figured that locals using town names in their web searches would find her fairly easily, but then again, she was comfortably finding new clients via referral.

I related that most of PlusOne’s clients were not from our local city, nor in fact from our home state of Queensland. In fact half are from overseas. And at least half of our clients have been gained through means other than our website.

Which brought us to the topic of business practice and doing business – via the internet. The internet needs to be recognised as more than just the world wide web. It is also a means of electronic communication - of being able to move data easily and for virtually nil cost.

This means that many types of business can be a global enterprise.

For the lady with the secretarial service, we talked about what business was now and what one using the internet could be like. As I mentioned earlier, she has four casual staff physically located close by, and a large number of clients all of whom, with the exception of one, are also geographically local.

So this scenario came up:

• Workers could be anywhere – as long as they had internent access
• Clients could be anywhere – information may have to be sent by post (typically receipts etc if a bookkeeping job), but often could be sent as attached files by email
• The type of business undertaken was only limited by the skills of the workers
• The business owner fills the role of co-ordinator – spending time working on the business, not in the business.

So where does this leave the question of a website? Certainly the registration of a domain name and an email service will allow a professional image in email communications. New clients may well be recruited via word of mouth and referral and information on business services can be sent via email.

But in this expanded worldview, a website can provide an easy point of reference. It need be only a fairly simple site, detailing the range of services provided, with a funnel approach to a contact form where the prospects basic needs can be gathered.

Then of course nothing beats good old-fashioned contact - and with phone costs relatively cheap – or even using services like SkypeOut for cheap internet telephony, nothing beats a friendly chat for closing a deal.

Are you using the internet (as distinct from the www) to create a different business model than would have been possible wthout it? If so, let us know via comments.