Include online services in your marketing plans

Although online services such as CompuServe, Prodigy, America Online, GEnie and Delphi now offer their subscribers access to the internet, it is a mistake to assume that your internet-only marketing activities will reach them. Many of these services' subscribers spend most or all of their time in the service's own areas, not on the internet. Here are some reasons why you should include online services in your marketing plans.

n Every online service has business- and marketing-related discussion groups where you can get advice and make customer contacts. Try the small business forums on America Online or CompuServe, the PR/Marketing Forum on CompuServe, the Your Business BBS on Prodigy, or the Home/Small Business Roundtable on GEnie.

n Classified ads on online services are read by thousands. Ads on these services are actually classified into categories, which makes it much more likely that your ad will find an appropriate target than it will on ad-related discussion groups such as biz.misc or misc.entrepreneurs. America Online does not charge for classified ads. Prodigy charges $30 a month for a small ad, and CompuServe charges by the line and the week.

n Online services have far larger proportions of consumer-oriented users than the internet, and their median household incomes are higher.

n Information databases on CompuServe, Delphi, and GEnie in particular offer opinion poll results, trade names, manufacturers' registers, Dun & Bradstreet or Hoover's company profiles, and lots of other information that is harder or impossible to get on the internet.

It may cost you a few bucks a month for an account, but online services are rich with opportunities and information that should easily justify the expense.

Armies that go into battle without their weapons at the ready invariably lose. Do not go into online battles without preparing and organising your weapons in advance. For example:

n Prepare boilerplate e-mail messages about you, your business, or your products so they are ready to send out when people ask for them. If you use a full-featured mail programme such as Eudora, you can create a separate mailbox in which to store canned messages so they are easy to find. Save your outgoing mail messages, too: many of these can be reworked for additional replies so you do not have to completely rewrite a response each time.

- Prepare two or more signatures to append to different types of messages. I use a personal and a business signature, but you might even have several different business signs that highlight different aspect of your business or expertise.

- Getting information from a tour of the internet has been compared with getting a drink from a fire hose. Every trip online yields dozens of URLs you will want to check out or e-mail addresses of people you may want to contact, but they fly by so quickly it is hard to remember them. I open a blank e-mail message whenever I read my mail, and I use it to store URLs and addresses that I glean from incoming mail or mailing list discussions, web pages, discussion group messages, or classified ads. Later, I set up a time to go online and do nothing but explore these new leads and resources.

- If you are aggressive about your marketing programme you will be trying to post useful information in as many appropriate places as possible, but it is hard to remember where and when you posted everything, which makes it difficult to go back and find things when they need to be updated or removed. If you post messages or articles to discussions, FTP sites, or web pages, keep a log of each posting so you will know what you posted where and when.

- Use hotlists and (on online services) favourite places menus or windows to store frequently-visited locations so you do not have to remember how to navigate to them every time.

- Once every couple of weeks, go through your mailboxes, resource files, and hotlists and delete entries you have already reviewed or that you no longer need. Otherwise, your disk, mailboxes, and menus will become so cluttered that it will be hard to find anything in them.

- The author is the Father of Guerrilla Marketing and author of Guerrilla Marketing series of books. The views expressed here are his own

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