Nearly every business will benefit from having an internet presence. However, before rushing to throw any old content onto the web, take time to create an internet strategy that dovetails into and helps drive your larger marketing and business plans.
Reaching customers—and potential customers—using online marketing is more a matter of commitment and strategy than it is a financial expenditure. It does not need to be expensive to reach online customers effectively. Using a market-led approach to Internet marketing, you can build an effective website and attract customers through various Internet-based marketing tactics.
Internet marketing involves the use of digital media to inform the market of your business and to entice people to purchase your products and services. The internet (and, by extension, mobile) is merely a vehicle to provide greater reach for your advertising, promotional and public relations efforts. Internet marketing must be part of your integrated marketing approach. Internet marketing strategies should be included within your company's overall marketing plan.
Businesses that want to boost the results of traditional advertising need to dovetail their advertising strategies with Internet strategies rather than viewing them as independent channels. A good Internet site, for example, improves the effectiveness of other advertising because many customers who see your company's advertising will evaluate your company's products and services online. Integrating Internet marketing tactics with other advertising ensures that your company provides a consistent brand experience.
You need to consider the following topics when you develop your overall Internet marketing strategy:
The centerpiece of your internet marketing efforts is likely to be your company's website. Although many experts are pointing the upsurge in social media as a central touch point between businesses and customers (and potential customers) every business must have an effective website. According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, at the close of 2010, 77 percent of Americans now use the Internet on a regular basis. Of these internet users, 78 percent report looking for information online about a product or service that they were thinking of buying; 66 percent stated that had bought a product online.
The number of individuals who are accessing the internet via their smart phones is skyrocketing. As of May 2011, 35 percent of Americans report using their smart phones to access they internet. This means you need to consider
how your website looks on a smart phone and
how you can leverage general social media (Facebook, Twitter) and location-based social networking (Groupon, Foursquare) to reach customers when they are actively seeking information regarding goods or services.
While it is important to understand and monitor Internet usage patterns, it is also necessary to identify the online activities of your target markets. You can use the demographic and behavioral trends you've gathered through primary research and secondary research to identify the categories of use among your target markets. For example, prior to implementing an e-commerce solution, you must identify the online shopping patterns and preferences of your target markets. By identifying the expectations and needs of your target markets before you begin marketing on the Internet, you can build the foundation of an effective, market-led website.
Websites Serve Many Purposes
Your website will serve as a natural consumer destination. Customers who visit your website are looking for meaningful information to distinguish your company's products and services from your competitors. Use the website to highlight distinct features offered by your company. Provide side-by-side comparisons of products. Customers spend less time thinking about your products, services and industry than you do. Provide them with the information they need to know about your industry, your products and your services in order to make an informed buying decision. Your website is an outstanding way to educate customers online—even when you are selling to them offline.
Step back and take a "macro" view of your customers and the Internet experience as you develop your website. The most effective websites combine the benefits of mass marketing with those of customer relationship marketing (CRM) to provide each visitor to your site with a personal brand experience.
Mass marketing's goal is to constantly acquire new customers by differentiating your company, and its products, from competitors. This results in a strong brand identity, but it does not always adapt well to Internet marketing because visitors to your site are often seeking targeted information, rather than more general mass market messages. The goal of CRM, by contrast, is to continually increase the volume of business with existing customers by offering a range of personalized services and products. While this can result in good customer service, but does not adequately differentiate your organization from its competitors among potential customers. Luckily, a well-designed website can blend these approaches together.
Website content needs to guide target markets from discovery, through exploration and interaction, toward action. The first 10 seconds your target markets spend on your company's website are among the most crucial. Site visitors determine whether they will become site users. They perceive the value of your site. They form first impressions about your company and predict the likelihood of finding useful information on your website. Many visitors will leave your website immediately because the site seems unrelated to their search. Others will explore your site.
The chart below illustrates how consumers interact with the Internet. The first challenge is to get consumers to discover your website. Once they're on the site, they need a reason to explore. Typically only 60 percent of visitors will stay on your site long enough to skim or read some of the content. Approximately 15 percent of your visitors will interact with the tools to help them make a purchase decision, and 2 percent will act on that decision.
All visitors to your website are seeking information. During the exploration phase, each page of content has less than a minute to communicate with a site visitor. The amount of time visitors spend exploring your website, and their perception of value of the time being spent, varies based on their ability to progress toward the desired buying decision.
Site visitors interact anonymously with your website. Through these various interactions, they form lasting impressions about your company, its products, and its level of service. This includes comparing the information that you provide with information they have received from other sources. Getting customers involved through interactive elements, such as a self-assessment, can be an effective method for cultivating strong customer relationships and gathering additional customer insights.
Successful websites typically include the ability for customers to act online—to call, purchase a product, find a local distributor or retail location, or request a proposal. All websites should include the ability to follow-up offline, by telephone, since some customers prefer speaking with someone to submitting an order or other information online. Be sure to include these elements when planning your company website.
The development plan for your company's website can be broken into multiple phases:
What do you want to accomplish via your website? What do you want customers to learn about your business? How do you want them to perceive your business? What actions to you want them to take on your website, or as a result of your website? The answers to these questions will help you identify how to use the Internet to support or achieve some of the specific communication goals and marketing efforts.
Your objectives for your website should be based on your overall communication, marketing and sales goals. And, it is critical that these objectives are measurable. Equally important is the ability to effectively measure whether objectives are met. Such objectives might include:
As noted above, having a robust and steady stream of visitors to your website should be one of your internet marketing objectives. Capturing as much information as you can about each visitor is extremely important. Each time visitors access your site, information about their visits can be saved. This information can be used to generate "web statistics" that characterize your site's overall use.
In most cases, you will use a web hosting service that will provide you with both an internet domain name and server space. Most of these services will provide some level of web site analytics for a very small additional fee. You can compare various hosting companies by going to Hosting Review or Top 10 Best Website Hosting.com
It is worth your time and effort to evaluate a number of companies to find the best match for your business.
There are a number of technical information that can be collected about each visitor to your website. This information falls into several major categories:
The information can also be aggregated to give you an overall picture of how your site is used (e.g., how many visitors/day, peak usage times, what pages are most popular, what path do most people take through your site.) Many hosting services provide some measure of analytics. In addition, there are numerous companies that offer low-cost or free analytics services.
Web statistics are a useful tool for measuring site usage. For example, using web statistics, you can calculate a number of useful marketing-relevant indicators:
By establishing objectives prior to setting website strategies, it may also be possible to integrate objective specific reporting features. In the same way site visits collect information for web statistics, information can be collected for measuring objectives.
Before you begin to design the actual website, you need to develop a strategy that is likely to achieve the objectives that you hope to achieve with your website. As with all marketing strategy, this requires an examination of your target market, available technology, and the rationale for the proposed strategy as it relates to alternatives, cost and support requirements.
For any strategy to be effective, your target market segments must contain a sufficient number of Internet users. The most effective Internet strategies will fail if the intended target markets are not online. Granted, with seventy-seven percent of Americans online, this is not likely to be an issue for most market segments. However, not all market segments are equally represented. For example, internet usage is closely correlated with income and education—the higher the income and education, the higher the percentage of individuals using the internet. In addition, non-English speaking individuals are considerably less likely to use the internet that English-speakers. (Note that demographic differences are markedly less for teenagers than for adults: regardless of education, income or language, teens use the internet.)
In addition to simply using the internet, you want your target market to be using the internet in a way that aligns with your business objectives for your website. For example, 80 percent of those in Gen X (33-44 years old) make online purchases. In contrast, in 2011, only 56 percent of 64 to 72 year olds use e-commerce. Thus, if you are marketing products or services aimed at older customers, you may not need an e-commerce solution on your website; rather, you may need to invest in a toll-free number with extended customer service hours.
Potentially effective Internet strategies are often delayed or quickly become cost-prohibitive because the technology and infrastructure required to implement the strategy are not present within the organization. For example, it may be desirable for a company to sell its products/services online. However, doing so requires the ability to update product information and process incoming orders. In addition, once implemented, Internet strategies may require ongoing support or third-party maintenance that needs to be considered.
Examine the objectives that you came up with when you were considering why you want to engage in online/internet marketing. Bump them up to a more generic statement. What do you really want to achieve? Increased sales? Increased brand awareness? Increased customer loyalty? Now, consider all the alternative methods of achieving the desired objectives: this includes non-Internet strategies that could achieve the same objective.
If your objective is to increase the number of subscribers for a newsletter, you may consider several strategies. You might promote the newsletter through free distribution in stores or libraries. Or you might change the content of the newsletter or its method/frequency of distribution so that it has a wider appeal to your target market. Although many strategies may address a desired objective, your business will need to distinguish the best strategy for a given set of circumstances.
After identifying the considerations for each proposed strategy, summarize the benefits of this strategy in comparison with others. Why is the proposed Internet strategy the best strategy for addressing the desired objective? How will it achieve the desired goal? What are the cost, technology and infrastructure advantages of this strategy as compared to alternatives?
Among the Business Tools are Internet Marketing Objectives and Strategies Worksheets to help you define your goals.
A content plan is a blueprint for your website that translates your objectives and strategies into concrete plans that can be implemented. A content plan collects the decisions you made within your marketing plan that will influence the design, structure and information included on your website. It provides individuals working on the website (who may not have been involved in creating your marketing plan) with the information they need to define the scope of the project.
Content plans typically include the following:
Among the Business Tools is an Internet Marketing Content Plan Worksheet to help you define your goals.
When creating a content plan, make sure to include what information you will need from the website and what information you will need to update. For example, if you anticipate adding weekly news, then the functional inventory should include a means of easily adding/modifying/deleting news from the site without requiring ongoing assistance from a web programmer or vendor.
The content plan provides the basis for creating an implementation plan if you're building the website yourself—or the basis for drafting a Request For Proposal if you'll be selecting a vendor to create the website.
The website implementation plan takes your content plan to the next step and provides detailed specifications regarding scope, timeline and budget. The blueprint and construction specifications analogies are excellent ones to keep in mind. If you are building a house, you need to decide in advance if the house will have a basement or be on a slab, how many bedrooms and bathrooms there will be, and what type of exterior facade you want. If you change any of these key decisions once the house is nearly complete, the entire project will be derailed. You may need be able to get the changes you want, but, even if you can, the costs and delays will be prohibitive. The same applies to website design. If you don't take the time to get the requirements exactly right, you will face significant cost overruns and delays.
Your implementation should contain the following sections—specified in exacting detail:
The production time needed for building your company website only reflects a portion of the overall cost, typically half of the budget. Costs associated with planning, design, and testing also need to be included for an accurate budget.
Among the Business Tools is an Internet Marketing Implementation Plan Worksheet to help you define your goals.
Before you can develop the budget for your project, you will need to conduct research on the feasibility of different website construction options. The choices run the gamut from a complete "do-it-yourself" project to contracting for the complete installation.
The DIY option is more feasible if you (or your employees) are familiar and comfortable with technology and your functionality and customization requirements are relatively basic. Most hosting services have a wide selection of semi-customized templates that you can use to build and launch a website in a matter of hours without having to know any web programming languages.
The downside of the do-it-yourself approach is not so much in the actual building of a basic website as it is in understanding what makes an effective website. While internet usability is not the proverbial "rocket science," there are rules and best practices that you may not want to devote time to learning. If you want to make sure that your website pays for itself in increased sales and revenue, then you may want to consider having some level of professional assistance. This could range from design consultation through the complete build of the website.
Make sure that you investigate whether your industry or professional group provides discounts or specialized website services. For example, web.com partners with the National Federation of Independent Businesses to provide free design services to members and TherapySites offers specialized websites for those in the mental health professions.
If you have many specialized requirements (for example, international transactions or live 24/7 customer service) then you should consider going through the Request for Proposal process with several different vendors. A Request for Proposal (RFP) provides the basis for selecting the website developer who will implement your company's website. An RFP is a version of an implementation plan that includes information requested from vendors to aid in selection.
Selecting a vendor is a three-stage process.
Your RFP should request the following information from each company on your short list.
Among the Business Tools is an Internet Marketing Request for Proposal Worksheet to help you define your goals.