1/24/2012
How Often Should You Review Your Internet Marketing Strategy
Internet Marketing Strategy Requires Ongoing Attention
A Strategic Look at Marketing in 2012
Back in December I wrote a post suggesting that companies change gears too often on their marketing. The flip side of this problem, of course, is not changing gears often enough. How do you know when it’s time, as an old manager of mine used to say, to stop beating a dead horse?
SEO and Social Media
Certain aspects of Internet marketing need to be reviewed on a monthly basis, regardless of your results. In particular, I’m thinking about social media and SEO. Changes in these areas are occurring at lightening speed, and companies need to be extremely careful NOT to assume that just because something worked yesterday, it will work tomorrow. Questions that should be hotly discussed at this moment include:
- How should we adjust our social media and SEO activities in light of rising importance of Google+ in Google’s search results?
- What does the future of your Facebook marketing look like? Only a year ago, it looked like a slam-dunk winner. Now we see legitimate concerns that Facebook has peaked.
- Google is now hiding certain search data, making it more difficult to evaluate results. What adaptations need to be made in terms of strategy and metrics?
- As a larger SEO issue, two big factors are changing the very meaning of SEO. First, the line between SEO and social media continue to blur; second, personalized search threatens to render the traditional emphasis on pure ranking obsolete. Again, how do we adapt?
Six months from now, the key strategic questions might look completely different — which is further evidence of the need for continuous strategic review.
Mobile Marketing
Another area that merits frequent strategic attention is mobile marketing. Earlier we predicted that mobile marketing would be the big story of 2011. I think we were off by a year; although mobile was big in 2011, lots and lots of companies have only begun to formulate a mobile strategy, leaving a lot of room open for rapid development and deployment in 2012. These are some questions you ought to be discussing:
- How many of our customers are using mobile devices for business?
- How many of our customers plan to use mobile devices for business in the next 12-24 months?
- How are our customers using or planning to use mobile?
- Is our website mobile ready?
- Is there a role for QR codes in our mobile marketing?
Companies can quickly get outflanked by competitors on mobile, and playing catch-up will be costly and difficult. To avoid getting caught in that bind, start by surveying customers and prospects to understand where they are heading with mobile technology.
OVER TO YOU
What are your big strategic challenges for 2012? What’s changing quickly in your marketing world?
Contact us to talk marketing strategy: we’d love to lend a hand. We specialize in B2B and offer a complete suite of services, with clients in industries as diverse as credit card processing for small business and aluminum fabrication.
2 Responses to How Often Should You Review Your Internet Marketing Strategy
Brad,
Given the constant pace of change within social media, the task of maintaining strategic plans with regard to using it as a marketing tool must be an enormous challenge.
As a guess, might one possible approach be to conduct a thorough review of the whole thing from top to bottom, say annually, but have one or two ‘check ups’ during the year to ensure that the big picture plan is basically being implemented successfully. Between these check-ups, fine tuning would obviously be required, but this would be limited to small changes only – major strategic changes would only be made during the thorough review of during the ‘check ups’ if these revealed that something serious had to change without delay.
Hi Andrew, Nice to hear from you. Normally I would agree with your comment without qualifications, but the recent and ongoing changes with respect to Google I think necessitate a full strategic review on a regular basis. Personalization, social media integration, keyword research, analytics are all being affected in a big way. I don’t know if this is the new normal or just another phase we’re going through, but I’ve never seen anything like it.