Internet marketing strategies can range from simply putting up a blog to building an online community and marketing through social media channels, with email or through viral marketing campaigns.
A comprehensive internet marketing strategy starts with driving traffic to your website, landing page, blog or other destination. You can drive traffic through a variety of methods but the following is pretty comprehensive:
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - This is the process of optimizing and structuring your website to rank high in the search engines for the terms that are important to your business - a must for every website. Ensure that your website is designed with SEO in mind. If you do not know what to do, find a professional SEO consultant to help you.
- Search Engine Marketing (SEM/PPC) - SEM is paying on a per click or per impression for traffic and exposure. You can place ads on Google and the other search engines so that when a user searches a keyword phrase that is relevant to your business your ad will be displayed in one of the ad slots available. This is great to use when you don't already rank high for the keywords you want. Budgets can be just a few dollars a day to get started. SEM is also a great way to test keywords and your ad copy.
- Social Media Marketing - Using the social media channels such Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and others is a great way to generate buzz about a topic and drive traffic to your site when you have content relevant to what users are looking for. This is most effective in conjunction with a blog or other updated content. Social media marketing takes time to establish a following and gain trust, but once you have invested the time it can be one of the most effective marketing tools available.
Once you have been successful at driving traffic to your site, you must then be able to convert the traffic from website visitors to leads and from leads to customers. Review your website stats (Google Analytics is free and very easy to install and use) to learn about how visitors are entering your website and where they going once they get there. Set up goals in your analytics tool so you can learn more about the traffic that is converting and then use that to modify your website to encourage future website visitors to do the same thing. Think of your website as a funnel. If 1000 visitors enter your home or landing page, how many actually accomplish your goal(s)? This is your site conversion rate and you should always look to improve it. Look at the pages necessary to complete the goal and streamline them as much as possible. All other pages in the site may be distracting website visitors so how can you use them to provide the visitor with the information they may need, but also direct them back to the pages necessary to complete the goals. You can use various calls to action to make this happen or even eliminate pages that are providing no value. Another method of optimizing your site to increase conversion rates is to constantly test your website. Once again, Google makes this very easy and with just a little javascript code, you can perform any number of A/B tests on content, images or entire pages of your website. Google provides the tool for free, but it may require some technical expertise to implement. Too many websites overlook website optimization and instead blame poor marketing for their failures.
The third area of your internet marketing strategy is your ongoing marketing to existing customers and leads you have generated. This is commonly referred to customer relationship management or CRM. There are a variety of tools to help manage customer contact data and even track all communications with your contact database. In essence you should strive to reach your audience with at least one email campaign per month. If you are writing blogs, then include those in your email and follow up with the social media marketing channels. Make a constant effort to reach out to your customers and demonstrate your desire to help them solve problems in which you have the solution. Don't be scared to ask for feedback and referrals.
If you can follow these guidelines you will be well on your way to a fully integrated online marketing strategy. Look for ways to include you offline marketing as well (PURLS are a great way to customize direct mail campaigns and lead them to online marketing opportunities). As you learn more and implement more of the strategies, remember to remain flexible, test your campaigns and ideas and look for ways to automate and personalize.
Further to the excellent and detailed answer above:
You need to blend internet strategies with accountable marketing principles. Is there a need or desire you can clearly satisfy, can you differentiate yourself, can you reach your target market cost effectively, is your offer compelling enough to get you customers and leads.
You can also think of it like this; How will you...
- Attract customers to your website and business
- Engage them and hold their interest
- Convert them into prospects or customers
- Nurture prospects into customers and generate repeat business
- Measure your results in-line with business performance - i.e. leads & sales