Ricky’s Online Business Blog

Enquiry

I’m currently venturing into unit trust business and would like to seek your advise on the following:

i) I would like to have my own unit trust business website, that promotes the business, benefits etc how do I go about doing this?

ii) How can I promote my website to the public?

Please advise, thanks.

Reply

First of all, it maybe well to check out with your company whether you can promote unit trust on Internet or not. I’m not sure about unit trust. But I have heard other kinds of financial products where it is against the company’s policy for agents to have a web site on their products.

Your web site can be static one, interactive one or Web 2.0 one (recommended). There are many ways of promoting on Internet and I can’t claim to be expert on this. Much can be left for later discussion. The most effective ones being:

- Search engine marketing
- Permission based email marketing
- Word of mouth viral marketing
- Web 2.0 style web site (community inputs)
- Using blog

If you are looking for a quick easy start, I suggest you start a blog. You don’t have to touch on unit trust directly. You can talk about yourself, your lifestyle, your religion, your hobby or any of your expert topic to build your reputation. But let them know you are doing unit trust.

When you develop reputation and friendships, people are likely to buy from you when there is a need. After all, many businesses nowadays, yours included, depend much on relationship marketing.

I have been benefited by a talk on blue ocean strategy held recently. It is one thing to read the book. But it’s another to listen to real life stories as two practitioners from Spritzer and StemLife shared how they apply blue ocean strategy in their respective companies.

While I should not divulge much details on their strategies, suffice to say that they are both market leaders in their own market space. They have strategies in place to create new markets and make their competitors irrelevant.

What I like about them is that they painstakingly and devotedly shared their knowledge and experience in strategizing for the benefits of the business community. Hopefully more and more Malaysian companies will discover our own blue ocean strategy and bring our country to new heights!

I heard they are not paid for their speeches. However, it is still good PR and CSR service for their companies as they educated us on the technical aspects of their products – mineral water of Spritzer and cord blood stem cells of StemLife. I have learned something new

Recently I was given the privilege to develop a web site for a sports carnival event in which I am an organizing committee member. It is a yearly event where teams compete in various sports, carnival stalls to provide food, games and fun, and many other goodies. I had to burn my midnight oil to finish it in just a few days!

Here is a technical summary of the web site:

• It is a combination of blog and web application.
• The blog allows for online collaboration by several authors.
• The web application allows online registration for sport teams and carnival stalls.
• SMS is used to send automated acknowledgment and reminders to members.
• There is a hidden panel for administrator to glean information and retrieve summary.
• The whole web site was developed using WordPress, PHP and MySQL.

Among other things experienced include:

• This is the first time where registration for the sports event is done by means of Internet only.
• A blog site is different from a conventional hierarchical web site, not only technically and but in concept as well. A blog requires us to think differently on how a web site works and how to use it.
• Blog is superb for online collaboration by many authors at the same time. This is moving from the old kind of working where one designer does all the updates.
• Blog is almost instantly indexed and updated in Google!

Next year the web site is going to be reused. In addition, we are going to have online payment as well!

I admit to be a big fan of W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne, authors of the best-seller Blue Ocean Strategy. They teach an important strategy to develop a new market where there is no competitor, instead of competing with existing competitors head-to-head in the current market space.

Here are a few lessons that impact me most:

• Value innovation – Offering innovative values to customers yet at a lower cost.
• Strategy canvas – A visual tool to assess the state of a firm and reorient it against competitors.
• Four actions framework – Deciding what to eliminate, reduce, raise and create.
• Attracting non-customers – Redefining the market by looking beyond existing customers to non-customers.

Here are two incoming events conducted by Lifelong Learning initiative by MCA (I’m not affiliated to MCA):

1. Talk on blue ocean strategy on 24th April
2. Reading session on blue ocean strategy and the success stories of Malaysian enterprises on 26th April

Would you like to join me?  Please contact me here.