You know that you have some real treasures to offer your customers: your superb services, your excellent products, your unequaled solutions. But how do you make sure that someone looking for your treasure actually finds it?

You must make sure the route is clearly marked and that those wandering the oceans of information on the Internet actually land on your website and find their way to your buried treasure.

Here are the best ways to make sure no one gets lost on their way to find you:

1. Create mountains of valuable, compelling content on your site. These mountains should be visible from faraway search engines, as long as you’ve done a good job of search engine optimization, keyword use, and link building.

2. Lead customers to you by sending out messages through your blog, keep the Twitter fires burning, and broadcast your webinars and podcasts.

3. Reach out to customers through e-mails, direct mail, advertising, telemarketing, and events.

4. Create multiple places to land through optimized landing pages, LinkedIn profiles, Facebook pages, a blog, and search-engine-optimized pages throughout your site.

5. Clearly mark the path to the treasure using clear navigation and clean design.

6. Give the keys to customers through an online form, giving them access to the riches you offer.

Other Resources:

• Animated Marketing Treasure Map:

• PDF of the Marketing Treasure Map. Just be sure to give us credit if you use it elsewhere.

P.S. Check out “Getting started with Twitter,” “Getting Started with Facebook,” and “Getting started with LinkedIn” if you need help opening and personalizing your accounts.

Change is something that all of us should consider for our organizations. With uncertain economic conditions ahead, it’s a good time for companies to evaluate their own strategies and policies and see if a change is in order in order to succeed, or even survive, hard times. Here are some questions that may generate discussion about whether you need to change:

Do you need to evolve the way you engage with customers?

• Do you allow two-way communication with your customer?
• Can customers easily ask you questions and post their thoughts about your solutions?
• Do you allow customers to communicate with each other?
• Are your customers receiving targeted, useful information from you?
• Do you get regular feedback from sales and channel reps about customer concerns?

Changes you can make now:

• Add Web 2.0 technologies (blogs, Wikis, RSS feeds, videos, etc.) to your websites so different types of online visitors can interact with you
• Create an online forum where customers can interact with your company, and each other.
• Evaluate how potential customers hear about your webinars, demos, and white papers. Make the lead generation path from awareness to registration clear and simple.
• Segment your e-mail lists by collecting reader preferences to ensure that customers receive targeted, useful information from you.
• Set up company pages on LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, and other appropriate social networking sites.

Do you need to change the way you position your company?

• Have your products and solutions evolved?
• Has your target audience changed?
• Is your brand still fresh, modern, and on target?

Changes you can make now:

• Set up your website so you can update it easily and often.
• Organize your site to allow visitors to quickly and easily find the information that they need.
• Update your positioning to reflect product, solution, and target audience changes.
• Incorporate feedback from sales reps, your channel, and customers.

If everything is working right now, and you have as much business as you can handle, you might need to make only minor adjustments to your marketing to grow your company. But, during the current economic challenges, changes in your marketing may be essential to not only growth, but survival.