Some marketing fundamentals never change. A brand is still a brand, a sale is a sale, and you always want them to leave the theater humming your tune. But the new wired economy really has rewritten all the rules.
For instance, finding customers just got a whole lot easier. And a whole lot harder. It's easier because the right Internet presence can replace an army of overworked salespeople with 24/7 robots that reel in prospects so fast that the turnstiles will spin like helicopter blades. But it's harder because most companies are utterly clueless about luring the right people to their sites in big numbers.
In the first part of an ongoing series on 21st-century marketing strategies and tactics, we'll show you the techniques used by the nation's top companies to attract customers and prospects. Future installments will focus on topics like branding, dynamic pricing, building loyalty, and electronic PR.
PC Computing's Business Labs polled the 100 businesses with the most Internet traffic, as ranked by PC Data, to uncover exactly how they did it. Do banner ads still work? What simple tricks can propel your response rates to double digits? What's the cost-effective method that launched a handful of little-known companies into the rarefied air at the top of the heap? We'll reveal all.
