Vision Thai2K

With over 1 billion web pages now online, your company's web page needs to be in a business directory. How do you choose the right one?

The INTERNET must surely be the most suitable medium for the advertising and promotion of Thai businesses to both the domestic and international markets. However, just being on the internet is not enough. The Thai business community must endeavour to use the internet to their best advantage by;

1. Making sure that their internet advertising campaign will be seen by the biggest possible number of people. This means having it listed, or hosted, on a suitable online directory. The choice of directories is very important, and in making your selection the following criteria should be considered;

• Does the particular directory have a high product or brand name recognition factor to both the domestic and international markets? If, for example, you had just a fleeting glimpse of just the name of the web site, e.g. www.Thailand-YellowPages.com in perhaps a small newspaper advertisement, on a sticker, or on a roadside billboard, would it be immediately obvious to you what the general content was likely to be? And having seen the name, would you remember it a week later?

• Given the important role of offline advertising in the effective promotion of web sites, does the directory under consideration have an obviously viable source of revenue to continually fund its own, and therefore your, promotional campaign.

• Does the particular directory offer you a suitably wide range of advertising options, at acceptable rates, to make going online viable for your particular business?

• Are the advertising options on offer user friendly, are they of an interactive design allowing you, the advertiser, direct access to change/add/delete the content from your own computer at will, and without the need to use HTML code?

• Does the particular directory have a workable business model or plan that will ensure it's advertisers reach both the online and offline audiences? It should be noted that the current Thai online market base is very small and numerous factors will continue to inhibit its expansion for some years to come.

• Is the particular directory well designed? Is it easy to navigate? Is it as fast loading as it can be, given the present connection speed available in Thailand? Does it have too many graphic images and banner ads slowing it down or drawing potential customers away from the content placed online by the core advertisers?

2. Understanding that in business, information is everything. In addition to providing Thai business access to the world's markets, your choice of directory should provide you with a high level of access to selected information that will help you make important business decisions. It should feature content that will help you discover and develop new emerging markets, broaden existing markets, discover new trends, tools and methods of doing things more cost effectively. It is of paramount importance that the decision as to what constitutes selected information remains in the hands of the subscribers and advertisers, and not the webmaster or web site management team.

• Does the process established by the particular directory present you with a comprehensive enough overview of both general and industry specific information?

• Does the particular directory provide you with access to a good range of business resources that can readily be used to improve or enhance the performance of your business?

• Does the particular directory provide you with more than just the standard statistics detailing numbers of visitors to your web page? It should offer you a more comprehensive package that draws on the statistics for the entire web site and presents them in a format that allows you to fully evaluate the cost effectiveness and relative performance of your advertising on Thailand-YellowPages.com

3. Realising the importance of choosing a directory that hosts a good community centre section or similar. The content should be specifically designed to encourage repeated visits to the site by those who are potential customers for our advertisers. It should be interesting enough that viewers will automatically promote the site amongst their friends by both word of mouth and 'word of mouse'.

• In your opinion, does the style and content of the community content meet the criteria it is supposed to?

Conclusion

Obviously, the criteria by which we recommend you judge a directory site are the same criteria we have applied in designing our web site and our business model.

We believe that in meeting those criteria for the web site itself, we have brought low cost and effective online advertising/promotion within the budget range of most Thailand based small and medium business enterprises.

We further believe that on the widespread implementation of the business model through a network of local agents, we will be able to provide our clients with viable, full or interim solutions to the remaining internet trading related problems particular to Thailand.