How to Build a Successful Internet Marketing Strategy in 5 Steps
By: William Jackson
Submitted: 2010-06-15 00:25:07 | Word Count: 598
How do you build an effective internet marketing strategy that will increase response rates, build a solid brand, generate leads and generate revenue? It’s quite simple actually. Though it may take some tough internal discussions, some outside validation and surely some testing, following these five steps will put you on the path to building a successful internet marketing strategy:
1.Look at where you’ve been to determine where you should be going. Take an inventory of the different media types that you’ve used over the previous 12 months. Get common metrics on all of your marketing activities, such as the cost-per-lead, cost-per-qualified-lead and the number of leads produced. Identify allocation of funds, results achieved and the ROI realized per media type. Decide what was effective and why. Identify what elements drove success such as offer, message, list, etc. and plan to create similar campaigns that leverage those findings.
2.See what the other guys are doing and identify what you can do better. Conduct a competitive benchmark by reviewing the programs or websites of your top competitors and compare their strategies to yours. It’s critical that you understand what your competitors are doing better and worse than you. Leverage this insight to determine where you can win immediately and where competitive catch up is needed.
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3.Define who you’ll talk to and what you’ll tell them. Assemble all key stakeholders and all members of your organization that touch your customers and prospects and conduct a workshop to identify and rank the most important key purchase criteria for each of your target segments. With that data, highlight strengths and weaknesses of each competitor and identify sources of competitive advantage and applicable key messages.
4.Validate what makes you remarkable. Validate your previous findings with your customers, prospects, lost customers and lost prospects. Be sure to construct your discussions in a way that tests your 1.marketing effectiveness vs. your competition, your defined key purchase criteria and your unique value proposition. Also, test if the effectiveness of each changes per segment.
2.Align your activities with your goals. Determine the media strategies that will help you best connect with your target audience and their needs. For each media type identify related tactics, budget allocation and your lead, qualified lead or ROI goals per item and use a campaign planner to detail the frequency per activity, budget allocation and expected results month over month.
Remember that your market will change its behavior over the course of the year, monthly or even daily, so repeat this entire process as often as you can. With that you’ll be on your way to delivering the right message to the right audience with the right offer which will surely increase response rates, generate leads and generate revenue.
For the past 10 years Mike Plante has applied his experience in all B2B marketing facets including direct marketing, web optimization, search engine marketing, research, lead generation and lead nurture. Today, Mike works with Nowspeed clients to determine the best internet marketing strategy mix to meet their needs. Mike provides counsel on strategic planning and execution and works with clients to define internet marketing program objectives and metrics. Mike’s goal is to work with each client, big or small, to implement best practices to generate leads, increase revenue and increase market share.
Author Resource:-
For the past 10 years Mike Plante has applied his experience in all B2B marketing facets. Today, Mike works with Nowspeed clients to determine the best internet marketing strategy mix to meet their needs and helps to define strategic internet marketing program objectives and metrics.
