Online Marketing
In today’s hyper-competitive, highly connected world, consumers and business-to-business decision-makers are increasingly reliant on the Internet when they are carrying out pre-purchase research as well as when they are actively in the market to buy – online and offline. As a result, online marketing is more important to the success of your business than ever before.
A review of some of the key numbers about the Internet’s size and activity level underscores the importance of online marketing:
- 1.67 billion Internet users around the world as of June 2009 [1]
- 113 billion searches were performed in the month of July 2009 [2]
- 1 trillion pages indexed by Google as of July 2008 [3]
- 233 million sites across all domain as of November 2009 [4]
- 300 million+ Facebook users as of September 2009 [5]
A few more key facts about the impact of the Internet on buying behaviour lend even greater credence to the importance of online marketing:
- 33% of people who perform online searches are actively in the market to buy [6]
- 77% of people who do pre-purchase research online use search to do it [7]
- 25% of people performing a local online search followed up with a post-search purchase – 63% of whom purchased offline (underscoring the growing influence of search in local and offline buying behaviour [8]
The message is clear: online marketing has the capability of putting your business in front of the world’s largest audience of active qualified buyers as well as people who are beginning to recognize they have needs that must be addressed– some of which can be addressed by your business’ products and services.
Don’t you think that your business should expand its online presence to ensure that people can find it?
Why Some Businesses Struggle with Online Marketing
While online marketing is critical to a business’ success, many business owners and managers struggle to get it right – which means they fail to achieve the improvement in traffic to their websites that is truly within their reach – in large part due to the fact that the online marketing universe comprises a seemingly overwhleming array of marketing channels:
- Web presence
- Search engine marketing
- Search engine optimization
- PPC and online advertising
- Social media
- Email marketing
- Mobile marketing
- Web analytics
Not only do business owners need to choose the online marketing channels that are right for their businesses – based on where their target markets can be found and how their target markets like to be engaged – they also have to make sure that their online marketing efforts are fully integrated in order to leverage the full extent of the opportunity and maximize the returns.
This means extending the integration beyond the scope of online marketing to include a business’ offline marketing efforts as well as its broader, overall sales and marketing efforts. Total online and offline sales and marketing integration will have an exponential impact on results.
Five Steps to Online Marketing Success
Success – in anything – does not just happen. Success is a result. Failure is also a result. Specifically, success (or failure) is the result of a process. If you want to improve the result, you must improve the process that produces the result.
Success with online marketing is no different.
Following are five key steps you need to take in order to achieve total online marketing success.
- Appraise your situation – review all past, present, and planned marketing efforts and effectiveness; review market landscape and behavior; and review competitive landscape and behaviour
- Create an integrated marketing plan – identify purpose and goals; define success metrics; and plan all activities across all marketing channels (taking care to leverage each one off of the other)
- Implement the plan – launch initiatives; roll out metrics and tracking systems; and monitor the performance of your plan
- Analyze the results – assess actual performance against expectations, paying close attention to outstanding-positive and outstanding-negative results; and reverse-engineer from results to get to root causes of performance challenges
- Take action on results – review purpose and goals; review success metrics; continue and/or expand efforts that are producing outstanding-positive results; and reassess, discontinue, and/or contract effort that are producing outstanding-negative results
Not only will this framework help you achieve online marketing success, it will also enable you to achieve continuous improvements in your online marketing efforts and, as a result, continuous improvements to your bottom line.
Contact me for more information or for help with your marketing efforts.
[1] Internet World Statistics
[4] Netcraft Web Server Survey
[6] Search Engine Marketing, Inc (page 20)
[7] Search Engine Marketing, Inc (page 20)
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