Online is just one more marketing & sales channel and should sit under the broader organisational level sales & marketing strategy. Digital marketing does however bring with it some novel tools & extra levers with rapidly evolving ideas about how to best deploy them. Here are a few considerations around the formation of your online marketing strategy:
Segment, Sub-segment & Sub-sub-segment
Segmentation is the key to successful digital marketing. Applying old school mass marketing methodologies will achieve the same old school mixed & fuzzy results.
Install Analytics
Measuring the quantity, quality and source of website traffic is now an essential marketing practice.
Harmonize your Online and Offline Marketing Collateral
Websites should compliment an organization’s off-line marketing collateral. Branding and market positioning should appear consistent across all touch-points.
Website Improvement for Search Engines (SEO)
A website must be picked up by the search engines for the most important keywords around the various market segments which it’s targeting.
Website Improvement for Human Visitors
A website should appear fresh, up-to date, clean and organized. It should load quickly. It should be easy to navigate to anywhere in the site from anywhere in the site. It should positioned as a value driven work horse (not a sugar eating show pony).
Develop skills In-house
Outsource the more complicated aspects of digital marketing to the professionals, but bring the essential skills in-house. Control your own website content, make adjustments to your own online campaign settings, interpret and act upon your own website analytics.
Calculate Your Return on Investment (ROI)
Track and measure everything. Assign all actionable outcomes - not just sales - an internal financial value. By tracing outcomes directly to their campaign sources it’s a simple process to calculate the ROI for each campaign dollar spent.
Think Global
Break away from the idea that marketing gets more expensive the wider the geographic net is cast. Digital Marketing is about whom you’re marketing to, not where you’re marketing into. Physical distance from any point is a meaningless concept in a digital marketplace.