Internet Marketing For Businesses
In recent years, the dust is starting to settle and while there are still some pockets of chaos, most businesses need a clear strategy when approaching website development, social media marketing, brand development and advertising online. The importance of well defined Internet marketing strategies for businesses is more clear now than ever before and yet many businesses lack the plans needed to guarantee success within their industry. For most of its formative years, the Internet felt like the wild west of business marketing. Those who took their work online found themselves contending with a wide array of possible problems, often without a strategy to keep them afloat.
In this special two part post, I want to talk about what these strategies entail, why they are so important and why those who take the time to define them in advance stand a much better chance of finding success online.
1. Online Business Goals and Timeline Development
One of the first things you should do, well before you invest any real money into an online marketing strategy is to clearly establish online business goals. These goals should clearly state exactly what you hope to do with your business and how you plan to achieve it.
So, you must ask yourself questions like these:
What do I want to gain from my website?
Am I interested in brand development, global expansion, creating a new revenue stream or digitalizing services/products we normally offer offline?
Will I be a major component in this branding strategy or will it be the company’s face on the website?
Will this be a core component of the business or an ancillary part of the marketing plan?
Businesses generally feel they have two options when going online - either ignore their offline components and pour money into the online efforts or marginalize the web effort as a marketing tool. Neither is necessarily correct (though either may be in your case). Your goal should be to thoroughly investigate your industry, determine what will benefit you most and then work towards reaching your goals based on those findings.
More importantly, set a clear timeline for reaching your goals. Concrete goals such as the reach of your website, volume of online sales, percentage of total revenue and brand recognition online are important, but so too is a clear timeline for when those goals will be met.
2. Budget and Resources
The next major component of your Internet marketing strategy is to determine how much money and how many resources you will devote to meeting the above goals. This will have a lot to do with how you see your web presence panning out over time. If you expect your website to reach 40% of your total sales in 2-3 years, then you had better be willing to invest a comparable amount of money to make that happen.
Sit down now and establish what you will invest in marketing, development and management of your web properties based on what you expect to get out of them.
When developing an Internet marketing strategy, the first two steps are the hardest. The temptation to skip over them or to jot down a few notes and call it good is strong, but the more clearly you outline exactly what you want from your business’s web presence in advance, the better you will perform when working towards those goals later.
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