Successful internet marketing begins with developing a solid online marketing strategy. It shouldn’t start by simply choosing technologies or tools. It seems obvious, but too many organizations start with the technology instead of working to fully determine what they want to achieve.
The good news is that developing an online marketing plan is actually not much different than developing a traditional marketing plan. In fact, the steps are exactly the same with one large difference: online marketing allows marketers to work on building relationships with their customers.
Provided below are five steps to developing an effective online marketing strategy:
Step One: Defining Goals
The first step in any marketing plan is to decide upon your overarching goals. Goals are a loftier than objectives. They typically aren’t easily measured and are often longer term. For example, my personal marketing strategy is to ‘become a thought leader in the field of online marketing strategy development’ (I also blog primarily to provide a personal creative outlet and a record of thoughts on marketing).
Step Two: Audience Selection and Research
Next you need to decide on who your primary audiences are and how can you reach them through digital channels. In the case of my personal marketing strategy I am targeting other marketing and communications professionals, business owners in need of marketing advice and conference organizers in need of speakers.
For this blog I haven’t spent much time analyzing my audiences. Although I do make some basic assumptions that other marketers read blogs and that many conference organizers search for speakers online. For your own marketing strategy development you may want to consider conducting primary and secondary research to develop greater insight into your audiences’ online social behaviors and attitudes.
One tool I find useful for digital marketing audience research is the Forrester Research technographics profiling tool*:
http://www.forrester.com/empowered/tool_consumer.html
In summary this tool will provide you with some basic understanding of online behavior based on demographics such as age, location and gender. Forrester also provides more in-depth reports for various industries for a cost.
My recommendation would be to start with some basic assumptions of your audiences and then seek to refine and confirm those assumptions over time. This will help you avoid analysis paralysis and will ensure that you don’t get stalled at this stage. The expense of most digital marketing is not enormous, so you’ll have a little more room for making mistakes.
Step Three: Defining Objectives
Once you’ve identified your audience and have conducted your research, you will need to set some objectives. The framework I use religiously is SMART. Objectives need to be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-bound.
For my personal marketing plan I have developed the following objectives:
1. Expand my network by 20 meaningful contacts by January 2011.
2. Secure three major speaking engagements by June 2011.
Notice that my objectives aren’t bound to specific tactics such as write a new blog post every week or attend a networking event twice a week. These are tactics and should be simply listed in your activities section. You will also notice that I didn’t focus on statistics such as web traffic or number of Twitter followers etc – these are important to track but should be considered tactical rather than strategic.
Step Four: Developing Your Strategy and Choosing Tools
Once you have solidified your objectives you need to get to work on developing the strategy. Or in basic terms you need to figure out what tactics you will use and how those activities will help you achieve your objectives.
In a traditional marketing strategy you would be primarily focused on increasing awareness through brute force methods such as advertising. In online marketing you need to achieve your objectives by building relationships.
If you’ve done your audience research you should have a good understanding of where to find your audience online and should be able to pick appropriate tools to help you reach your audience effectively. Remember: your tools/tactics should be directly tied to helping you achieve your objectives **.
For my personal marketing strategy I build relationships by:
1. Blogging: Through blogging I will add value to my audience by providing useful marketing-related information. I will do this by writing one insightful and entertaining blog post per week and by engaging with readers through dialogue and online comments. I will also seek to write my posts with search engine keywords in mind to help increase my organic search traffic for common industry-related terms. I will maintain a speaking page on my blog which provides the benefits and testimonials on my speaking abilities.
2. Twitter: By tweeting I will build a network of marketing and communications peers which can be leveraged to provide me with a source of real-time industry-related knowledge, social interaction and a platform for content distribution. I will build this network by writing five to ten insightful and entertaining tweets per day and by conversing with my twitter followers.
3. LinkedIn: By participating on LinkedIn I will personally connect with marketing and communications peers with the intent of building close professional relationships. I will also seek to add value to my peers by connecting individuals within my network with each other, adding recommendations where appropriate and by answering questions to various industry-related discussion forums.
4. Article Marketing: By writing and posting one marketing-related article to popular article marketing directories such as E-zine and articlebase I seek to add value to other marketing and communications professionals while increasing the number of reputable links to my blog.
5. Speaking: By speaking at industry conferences I hope to add value to others while increasing my profile and building my network of professional contacts. I will seek to leverage these opportunities by attaining testimonials with the aim of developing further speaking opportunities.
6. Networking lunches: By personally connecting with individuals within my network I will plan to have at least two to three networking lunches per month. I will use these lunches to learn from others, seek to help others professionally, interact socially and generally seek to strengthen relationships.
You will notice the last two tactics are offline activities. It’s important to remember that most great marketing strategies consist of both on- and offline activities. In this case I’m focused on personally connecting and building relationships however your offline activities may also include advertising, public relations, sales promotions, event marketing and more.
Step Five: Measurement and Optimization
The approach you will want to take with your online marketing is one of iteration and continuous improvement. Digital marketing provides latitude for making mistakes, and an enormous opportunity for refinement and optimization. You will want to measure your tactics to help you continuously improve. But, also try to keep your eye on the bigger picture and tie your primary metrics to your primary objectives.
In my example I will achieve success if I’ve reached my networking and speaking goals. However, I also keep detailed statistics on my web traffic including top content, source referrals and Analytics goals *** On Twitter I keep track of the number of clickthroughs on links I post and the number of retweets my content receives, and with article marketing I keep track of the number of views and the clickthroughs to my blog. For my speaking engagements I am primarily interested in audience ratings and testimonials. I’m less concerned with statistics tracking for networking lunches and LinkedIn.
I use these statistics to help me refine. In the case of my blog I am constantly looking to refine my writing both for content and search engine optimization. For Twitter I recognize that if content isn’t retweeted that I need to refine my approach and be more choosey about what I post. And for speaking engagements I use the feedback to improve for next time.
Wrap Up
As I mentioned at the beginning, writing an online marketing plan is not that much different from developing a traditional marketing plan. I hope I’ve provided a basic framework and some simply, easily understood examples for you to learn from. Of course, this plan is fairly basic but it demonstrates that your plan doesn’t need to be complex to be effective. Start small and continuously refine and improve. More importantly, don’t start your plan by simply choosing tools. Instead, focus on strategy and the rest will fall into place.
Notes:
*To cover this tool in-depth would be too long for a blog post, but I recommend reading Groundswell to provide a great primary on social technographics and how to use them in your online marketing planning.
**To get a good understanding of the tools and how they can help you achieve your goals I would recommend reading New Community Rules by Tamar Weinberg, Six Pixels of Separation by Mitch joel and Trust Agents by Chris Brogan.
*** A great book on web analytics is Web Analytics 2.0 by Avinash Kaushik. Also be sure to check out Google Optimizer – it allows you to do multi-variate testing on web content (pretty cool stuff).
