“It constantly amazes me that normally intelligent people truly believe if you put up a Web site, you’ll have more business than you can handle. As a marketing professor, I see it every day. As a business person, I see it every day. As both a vendor and customer, I see it every day. Why do we advertise in the first place? What is the reality behind this ‘Field of Dreams’ medium of advertising? Most important, what is a Web site and what is its role in the marketing mix?

Let’s take a step back. Trade shows, something in which we’re all involved or your wouldn’t be reading this, represent an opportunity to open what is essentially a retail store for business-to-business customers. If you take an objective look at exhibitions, they are really shopping malls, lined with stores where visitors choose to enter ... or not. To give you a perspective, Mall of America (MOA) in Bloomington, MN, covers a total of 4.2 million square feet, more than half of which is leaseable space. A few facts from its Web site:

Web sites are just one of the many tools you need to use to generate business. The reason it’s called a mix is because you have to use a variety of advertising and promotional media to reach your target audience.

• 258 Statues of Liberty could lie inside the Mall

• If Mount Rushmore was divided into individual monuments, a president could reside in each of the Mall’s four courts

• Mall of America is big enough to hold 32 Boeing 747s

• Seven Yankee Stadiums can fit inside Mall of America

• If a shopper spent 10 minutes browsing at every store, it would take them more than 86 hours to complete their visit to Mall of America.

Compare this to one of the largest trade shows, the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), for instance. CES has only (only?) 1.8 million square feet of exhibit space, just over half the space of MOA. Think about this: one of the biggest shows doesn’t even begin to compete with a shopping mall.

Now, multiply the square footage of the largest mall you can imagine by a million and you get the World Wide Web. Picture it – hundreds of thousands of stores, all selling the exact same thing you’re selling. “Well,” you say, “not really. I am different from my competitors by doing X and Y and Z.” Really? But how do users decide you’re the company to talk with, to request a proposal from or to contact? Without some form of knowledge, how do your prospective customers differentiate you from your competitors?

Next time you have a few minutes or you’re working on your marketing plan, try a few Web searches. Using Exhibit Builder’s Source Book headings, I did a few searches on my own and here are the results.

• Adhesives: 17,400,000

• Banners: 65,300,000

• Exhibit systems: 36,000,000

• Fiber optics: 6,580,000

• Lightboxes: 40,400,000

• Lighting designers: 2,230,000

• Museum supplies: 2,430,000

• Raised flooring: 1,830,000

• Structural systems: 116,000,000

• Tension fabric: 2,170,000

• Transportation-common carrier: 1,980,000

The lowest number of search results is still more than two million! In the marketing mix, Web sites are just one of the many tools you need to use to generate business. The reason it’s called a mix is because you have to use a variety of advertising and promotional media to reach your target audience. One of my favorite adages, stolen from a friend who was national sales director for a large company is, “We do business with people we like, trust and respect.” Companies are amorphous beings, intangible. We work with our sales rep or customer service rep and they are the ones with whom we actually conduct transactions. We develop relationships with them, often developing friendships over a period of time. We know that business has to be win-win – we’re both there to make money.

o we’re back to the fallacy: If you have a Web site, you’ll have more business than you can handle. Wrong! My question to you is still, “How will buyers find your site?” The answer is the marketing mix.

Your tools, such as advertising in trade magazines, direct marketing or exhibiting at trade shows, allow prospects to get to know your company name, develop an impression of your company based on the design of your layout and the copy you use in either ads or graphics, and see how you interact through personal contact. Eliminating these in favor of only having a Web site reduces the number of ways customers can learn about you – and want to do business with you.

Take a page from consumer-oriented businesses. Every ad, every promotional tool, every voice we hear when we’re on hold, invites us to visit the corporate Web site. Even today’s packaging includes an invitation to drop by the site to learn more. No company expects Web sites to stand alone, to exist in a vacuum, or generate visitors without additional drivers.

When the Center for Exhibition Industry Research (CEIR) did a study on the various means attendees use to make purchasing decisions, respondents listed several sources. These included: direct sales, public relations, telemarketing, trade journal advertising, the Internet and, of course, trade shows.

The average Web site visitor clicks through 2.2 times. This means if someone browsing your virtual store doesn’t find the information he needs quickly and easily, he moves on to the next result that came up during the search.

Bottom line: You must advertise and promote your Web site just as you would any retail store, business-to-business or business-to-consumer, virtual or not. Web sites are just places to verify information, to look at your catalog, to see if there’s a match, at least on the surface, between you and visitors. And if you’re not driving visitors to your site to find all this out, by all means possible, using all the tools in your marketing kit, you’re going to lose business to companies that get it. eb