With the Internet having been around for more than a decade, everyone today is savvy about its uses and plugged into the fact that a website is crucial for giving you added credibility in your sales and marketing efforts, right? Well, no, actually. Many diamantaires and jewelers seem content to simply have a basic website and appear apprehensive about launching themselves into up-to-date Internet advertising and marketing. A quick and not very scientific survey of Israeli diamond firms based on their magazine advertisements finds that many do not even have a website. Not only that but they fill out their ads with their telephone and fax numbers and their postal addresses, but no website address.

 

And even when companies do go to the trouble of producing a website, the information on the site is usually a set of platitudes - tired old expressions about how “service is paramount” and so on. Basic English spelling mistakes don’t inspire much confidence, either. One large Israeli diamond firm’s website gave very perfunctory information on its profile page while every other page produced a “The Page Cannot Be Found” result. But at least it had a homepage. One company’s website does not even come up. Perhaps not surprisingly, that company’s magazine advert gives very little prominence to its web site and makes you look hard to find it. And it’s not just the Israeli trade. Many websites belonging to Indian, Belgian and even U.S. firms are not that much better.

 

With online advertising becoming increasingly sophisticated, what chance that diamond firms are keeping up to date and taking advantage of new techniques and technology to boost their sales and marketing? Israeli Internet consultant Gil Galanti believes they are behind the times and is scathing about the Internet marketing efforts of most local companies, saying simply “they don’t know what they are doing”. But they are not alone, according to the latest research on Internet marketing efforts. Almost 40 percent of 400 top marketing decision-makers in North America taking part in a study gave their marketing departments a grade of “C” or below in terms of how well they understand sophisticated digital marketing. The survey of more than 400 top marketing decision-makers in North America revealed that while strides are being made online, there is still considerable room for improvement. E-mail marketing is high on the list of digital enhancements in 2004. More than half of the survey participants indicated that customer profiling and analytics would improve over the coming year, along with better integration of online and offline marketing channels and touch points. Nearly half of all respondents will seek to integrate e-mail campaigns with personalized Web site interactions with customers, while roughly the same number strive for better measurement of their e-mail campaigns.

 

A look at how interactive advertising is breaking records in Britain shows the trend. According to a recent research report by Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) UK and PricewaterhouseCoopers, new expenditure records are being broken every quarter with the value of Britain’s Internet advertising market set to double by 2007, surpassing the commercial radio sector. “Marketers are investing more online every month because it works,” wrote Danny Meadows-Klue, chairman of the IAB UK. “Online is being used by mainstream marketers to support every aspect of the marketing mix, with a powerful track record now proven for those building brands and generating response.” The reasons for the jaw-dropping rate of expansion are varied. They include dramatic increases in the number of advertisers, the amount of time users spend online, marketers’ increased understanding of online’s branding impact and standardization making online advertising easier. And, as in the U.S., paid search is a strong factor, now accounting for 36 percent of the market, with banners remaining the most popular format.

 

Sachiv Mehta, Managing Director of Supergems n.v. in Antwerp, confirms that diamond firms, although aware of some of the developments in web advertising, have yet to throw themselves completely into the new way of marketing, preferring to stick with tried and trusted advertising methods. “We have not really done much in the way of online advertising,” Mehta said. “We have put a small part of our advertising budget into online advertising. We have a banner on idexonline.com that has led to a quite a number of calls coming in. To begin with, mainly Israeli companies were contacting us, but the impact of the advertising quickly spread across the international market with calls coming from both Europe and the Far East.

 

“Most of our advertising budget continues to be placed in trade shows and magazine adverts,” Mehta said. “We are still feeling our way because online advertising is still new to us and we are trying to see what our best option is. But we are always interested in new ways of marketing and have people in all our offices around the world looking for customer demand online and initiating contacts,” Mehta said.

 

His comments were mirrored by Brandee Dallow, Marketing Director of New York-based Julius Klein Diamonds Inc, who said for now, the firm found its website to be sufficient for its purposes and “extremely effective for our business-to-business work. We have not yet gone into online advertising although we are analyzing it and seeing how it would be able to help us. The website makes life easy for many retailers because we keep an online inventory and customers can check to see that products they want are there.”

 

According to Galanti there are two main means of web marketing: using search engines and direct e-mailing. “You can pay for what is called a sponsored link which is when your company’s name appears on the top right of a search engine page when a search is carried out using a particular word like ‘diamond’. But you cannot pay to place your company site high on the search results. However, there are ways of doing this and that is called search engine optimization and it’s today’s hot Internet marketing issue.

 

“Very few people have the knowledge to do it because it is very complicated, but I do it with companies I work with. The aim is to get as many links as possible from higher rank web pages pointing to your site with keywords in the link,” he explained.

 

As a medium, the Internet tries to harness its technology to give advertisers added value. It used to be thought that if a potential customer clicked on a banner that meant that the advertising had been successful and advertisers should pay for this. Like many other ‘truths’ in this medium, this one went bust just like many others. On the Internet you might want your advertising to serve as a reminder, a teaser, sell a specific product, announce a short sale, or forge your Brand. That means that the right graphic, the appropriate text, the right venue, and of course - the right goals need to be applied to each such campaign. Companies need to give thought about where they advertise. Where are your clients? Where are your potential clients? How do you get them to come to you?

 

Since reaching masses of information is only a click away on the Internet, it is not difficult to discover the tricks of the trade that enable web sites to increase traffic to their sites. When you submit your website to the search engines (SE), that is really all you are doing. It simply makes the discovery of your website a faster process for the SE’s. The search engines will at the website and inspect its content, then it will give you a ranking on their search results. So it is definitely possible to submit your website and be placed on the 20th page of results - a place that almost no visitor will reach.

 

It is important to have lots of content about the services or products you offer. It may be pleasing on the eyes to see lots of pretty pictures and nice elaborate designs but it is not pleasing to the search engines. Lots of text is the key to successfully getting the search engine to rank you higher because search engines cannot read the text you have on your images.

 

Another vital factor is having links from page to page particularly to other pages with more in-depth information on relevant terms. By doing this the search engine will rank your pages as having more relevant content pertaining to those certain terms. For example, if you sell a certain type of jewelry, whenever you mention it you could link that to a page with more in-depth information and background on the jewelry. Another important linking factor is links that are found outside of your website. Search engines use these external links as gateways to your website, usually the more the better.

 

However, having your links on websites that have high search result rankings will boost your ranking much faster than having them on a bunch of websites that have low rankings. This is because the search engines have found that these sites have very good content for their specific terms, and by linking to your website, as long as you have good related content, the search engine considers you as having better and more important content as well. It is advised that you find you find other websites that are either ranked higher or ranked comparable to your website.

 

Choosing the right keywords is critical. You could have a lot of good content about your services or products all over your website, but it will not do you any good if you are not using the right keywords. The key is selecting a few keywords that are most relevant to your website and the service or product that you offer. For example, a jazz music seller would use keywords such as: contemporary jazz music, older jazz music, classical jazz from the 1920’s, and so on. The key is to be as specific as possible while keeping in mind what is realistic for people to search for but avoid spamming your page, however.

 

Mail me on a Wednesday

You may think it does not matter when you send e-mails to potential customers as long as they are sent between Monday and Friday, right? But you’d be wrong. According to emarketer.com, an Internet and e-business research and analysis firm, Wednesday is the most popular day of the week for opening and clicking-though on e-mail marketing messages.

 

Based on research in the first three quarters of last year, Wednesday was the best day with around 20 percent of recipients opening and dealing with e-mail. Slightly behind in second place was Thursday and then in declining order, Tuesday, Friday, Monday, Saturday and Sunday.

 

So next time you are sending important mail and you want it to be read and dealt with promptly, Wednesday is the day.