How InfoPoint can help your marketing effort.

InfoPoint can help your marketing effort in several ways.

Making connections

The most important way is our combination of experience with businesses and our technical expertise.

You and your customers are constantly being bombarded with claims about technology. Often they are laced with acronyms and technical jargon that require training to understand. At InfoPoint, we believe that one of the reasons that so many dot-coms failed was that the management did not understand the technology.

On the other hand, the Internet is bringing computer technology to more people that ever. These people do not have training or technical expertise. That means that the gap between the experts who are designing for the Internet and the people who are using it is widening.

It would seem arrogant to claim that InfoPoint has some special technical expertise that sets us apart from others, but what we are saying is much less pompous than that. Each of us has spent many years doing nothing but making Web sites. Over the years we have created Web sites for hundreds of businesses. Some of us have backgrounds in software development, graphic design and other related fields. Over the years we have gotten to know other people in our fields. If someone claims to have made a breakthrough in this or that, we can just call friends inside the phone company or many other places and ask for an evaluation of the claim.

The point is that we do not have to know everything, we just have to know who to ask. InfoPoint is located in the suburbs of Silicon Valley and we interact with many companies there every week. We are sponsors of International Angel Investors, Inc. and get to read business plans and hear presentations frequently. Plus, there is just the simple buzz that you hear if you are able to pick it up. If the acronyms and technical terms mean something, anyone can hear a lot.

We are happy to introduce you to people and to share information so you can make the best decision for you.

Market research

The simplest description of "market research" is: asking people what they want. One difficulty with the Internet is that we often have to ask people about things that are completely new. People do not have experience with them. People say "yeah sure, I'd love to do X," but the pain of firing up the computer, logging in, trying to remember how to do a task is accomplished is just too much for them in real life. InfoPoint can help you by doing prototypes of sites and learning how they are actually used. Using PHP we can do rapid prototypes that can evolve into a finished product.

Building trust

There are many aspects to building trust. There is a recent article on some ideas in the MIT Sloan Business Review.

Having a site that is fast and intuitive with sufficient information goes a long way. InfoPoint can make that happen.

Making good decisions

InfoPoint has not been an advertising oriented site. Some of our customers, notably CEU Search have created sites where advertising is a primary form of revenue, so we do have experience. CEU search is focused on a specific community and generally Internet advertising needs to be rethought. In an interesting article in the Economist about Internet advertising it's growth had already started to decline by 1997 and is virtually at a standstill today.

What is especially interesting about the article is that the Economist believes that even though early efforts have not been successful, ultimately advertising will be. It has been InfoPoint's belief since it started in 1994 that the best Internet advertising is to provide useful information in a trustworthy way.

Contact InfoPoint and we can talk about how your Web site can be part of your overall marketing effort.