Online Marketing Strategy Essentials

Many businesses approach marketing backwards.They see the media they want to embrace hope bottle resized 600 being used by "everyone else" and need to be apart of the fray. Then, they assign someone in their organization to lead that effort. That poor staffer is sure to disappoint the manager or executive that had this "epiphany" because it more than likely wasn't wrapped into their entire marketing strategy with goals and milestones for success. ALL marketing ideas need to be thought through from the strategy level first, yet in my experience most if not all prospects come to us without any current marketing plan. Here are some important questions I ask potential clients. You should ask yourself these questions and fill in these blanks before you bemoan the results of any of your marketing campaigns.

Foundation: Do you have solid targeting and goals? What results are you currently achieving in important conversion metrics: hits, conversions by landing page, conversions by offer, visit-to-lead %, lead-to-sale %, etc. We find many of these numbers are not being tracked by the majority of businesses. Getting this data regularly requires planning and foundational elements to be built into your online elements (and preferably a good marketing automation platform.)

MarCom Strategy: Regardless of missing foundational elements, Marcom strategy (social media, blogs, articles, website content, overall messaging) needs to be developed around the needs of the prospect. Are you using keywords that the prospect uses or that your CEO uses? Is all your content really something the entry-level conversion target will find compelling or are you just feeding your product manager's ego?

Lead Generation: Are your lead generation goals incompatible with your risk tolerance, budget and resources? Is your strategy compatible with your sales cycle and product price point? Are you sales directors and top producers involved in the qualification conversation with marketing? Does your marketing team and sales team work together and have mutually compensable goals?

Lead Nurturing: What are you doing after each conversion to nurture that lead? Are you nurturing client retention? What's the cut-bait point for your leads? Where do they go?

Obviously, there is a lot that goes into a good business marketing strategy. Most companies want to run before they can even stand. We hope more companies will take this step of the process seriously because they are only wasting money on hope-in-a-bottle techniques. They jump from marketer to marketer, freelancer to freelancer claiming we are the problem. And, in some ways they are right. If firms and freelancers do not insist that clients have a plan in place first, they are putting themselves in harm's way.