8/26/2010
How to Succeed with Internet Marketing
Take the Right Steps in the Right Order
More simplified marketing. The following outline is something I prepared recently for a mid sized b2b client that wants to take a completely fresh look at their digital marketing program. Does your firm follow anything that looks like this? If not – would it help if you did?
Look before You Leap into Marketing
- Branding – What do you stand for?
- Targeting – Who are you trying to reach?
- Messaging – What are you trying to communicate?
- Conversion – What do you want customers and prospects to do?
- Analytics – How do you define and measure progress and success?
Key Challenges
- Branding – Do customers get a clear and consistent picture of your business?
- Targeting – Have you identified your target markets precisely?
- Messaging – Are you speaking in language your market understands and responds to?
- Conversion – Are you giving customers and prospects multiple ways to interact with you online?
- Analytics – Are you capturing the right data … and analyzing it?
Process
- Identifying strategic goals is the first step to crafting an ROI-driven marketing plan
- Determine an overall annual budget, evaluate all interactive options at your disposal:
- Web design, redesign
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
- Paid search – PPC and retargeting
- Conversion optimization
- Social media
- Email marketing
- Analytics
- Determine best options and allocate budgets for each option
- Formulate tactical plan for each option
- Launch program
- Evaluate results and make adjustments quarterly
Common Marketing Miscues in Mid Sized Companies
- Failure to craft a strategic plan
- Failure to adequately fund marketing activities
- Failure to set up conversion opportunities
- Failure to give programs adequate time to succeed
- Launching programs without adequate preparation
- Setting up too many programs and doing none of them justice
- Failure to define and/or measure results
- Doing information dumps rather than addressing customer needs
- Relying on poorly designed and written websites
- Failure to validate gut decisions with analytics
- Failure to moderate analytics-driven decisions with gut feel
- Failure to research customer behavior and preferences, competitors, and new market opportunities before creating a marketing plan
6 Responses to How to Succeed with Internet Marketing
You’re right – so many people just jump right in there without a plan or a process and wonder why whatever they’re doing isn’t working. It’s strange, because people are more likely to plan in a conventional, offline business. People need to start treating everything they do online as a serious business too!
Hi David, Thanks for your comment. I guess a lot of people are just virtually serious about a virtual business. I guess when we have tangible assets – brick and mortar, service vans, whatever – we take things more seriously than online assets. But the time and money invested in Internet marketing is just as real.
Brad,
I like the way you have set it out here: simple, logical and focused on the big picture.
Marketing is a process. Like any other process, in order for it to work well, you need to break it down into a structure which enables you to easily identify what each part of the process is and how each of the individual parts work together to achieve the desired end result.
This is a golden post, Brad. Wow!
Just getting technical for a minute, in your experience, what role does testing play in the ‘Process’ i.e. prior to launching the program?
Best, Robin
Hi Robin, Testing can play a rather large role prior to launch. For example, testing and analyzing customer sentiment prior to launch is pretty important for a branding program. In some areas, such as pay per click advertising, testing is really part of the program itself, so pre-launch testing may or may not be involved, depending on the client budget and other factors.
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