Internet Marketing can be a wonderful thing. You can reach a vast number of people, and all from the convenience of their computer or mobile device. Remember the days when you had to seriously consider putting posters at the mall? Not anymore. However, at times, online marketing efforts fail to deliver on expectations.
There are many reasons why Internet Marketing may fail you, and some of those reasons are out of your control. For the things out of your control, the best thing you can do is to mitigate the impact.
For the things within your control, however, you can do a lot, to find ways to make your online marketing campaigns work. The first step in working out the kinks in your Internet Marketing campaigns, is to identify the bottlenecks that are robbing you of a successful outcome.
Once you have identified the issues, the quest to rectify problems doesn’t end there. You need to analyse the issues with the interest of getting to the root cause. Once you get to the root cause, you can then work your way to the top of Internet Marketing success.
The best approach to eliminating bottlenecks and removing issues from your Internet Marketing campaigns strategy, is to ask yourself a series of questions. For each question, you should then seek for an answer in the positive, after which you move on to the next question.
The following are some of the questions you could ask yourself.
It’s a jungle out there, and not knowing your market well can be disastrous, with implications that are far-reaching and impact directly on your bottom line. It is important to dedicate time and financial resources into understanding your market, before launching an Internet Marketing campaign.
Often, there is always information asymmetry at play when you are marketing to potential customers. Information asymmetry is a concept in contract theory and economics, where one party knows more than the other when conducting transactions.
When you are setting out a marketing campaign, you are always operating with an information deficit. The intended customer often has a pretty good idea about what they want, and will make purchasing decisions based on their needs, whilst you make marketing decisions based on guesses about what their needs are.
To compensate for this apparent deficit in your knowledge of the customer, it is prudent to invest time and financial resources in market research. Be thankful that we live in interesting times, where the Internet provides us a great deal of the information and the tools we need, to carry out effective market research. In spite of the Internet, you may find it necessary to do research the old fashioned way in some cases.
Market research is the precursor to the next important question. Who are you trying to reach? The world is a broad place, and interests as well as preferences within it vary even more. It is not realistic to craft a campaign that will appeal to everyone.
There are different demographics to consider. You could be looking at customers from a certain geographic area, or maybe a certain gender, or particular social and economic dispositions. There is also the psychographic component to consider. Whilst every person is unique, there are certain traits that are common in the way they think, if you consider a particular set of determining factors.
I cannot stress more how important it is to clearly define your target audience. Doing this will narrow the focus of your online marketing campaign, and allow you to make more impact. It is better to reach fewer people with high impact, than reaching many more with no impact at all. This approach will serve you well in maximising your returns on marketing efforts.
It is impractical to imagine that you can launch an online marketing campaign that spans all mediums and platforms. It’s just not practical.
The medium determines what channel you are going to use for your online marketing campaigns. Are you going to go social via Facebook or Twitter, and the like, or maybe you are going to use search advertising with Google Ads for example.
Perhaps you would like to go more personal, and launch an email marketing campaign. All these are considerations, that will bring you a step closer to realising positive results with your online marketing campaign.
The platform speaks to the specific channel you will use, such as Google Ads as opposed to Facebook, or Twitter. It is critical that you pick the right platforms on which your campaigns will perform very well, as determined by your market research.
Ad copy has to be planned and developed to complement the content you produce on your website, if you have one. Ad copy is content that encourages a potential buyer to take action and purchase a product or service.
Every Website Should Focus On Content, because it is the key ingredient of the World Wide Web. Regardless of what everyone is doing online, they are consuming content. Your Internet Marketing Strategy should therefore be complemented by great content.
It is ideal that the ad copy and website content should be well planned. The reason for this, is that a planned online marketing campaign has a clear direction and path on which it will progress.
Well planned content and ad copy is likely to deliver better than random content published on a whim. Again the planning and development of content and ad copy has to be driven by insights gained from market research.
Whilst working alone on a marketing campaign is not necessarily a bad thing, collaboration is even better. You can bring in other energies on a campaign that can help improve its success. Other people and organisations will bring a fresh perspective that can be invaluable.
There are many partnerships you can bring in on an online marketing campaign. You can bring in artists such as musicians, even poets, or you can bring in technical expertise. You may even enlist the support of social media influencers, that can help you break through to certain demographics.
Measure, measure, and then do it some more. You need to measure the progress and strides your Internet Marketing Campaign gains. Measuring progress is the primary way to gain insights into your Internet Marketing campaign, to gauge if it is delivering according to expectations, or if it is failing. I touched on measurements in the blog post titled Finger On The Pulse: Web Analytics.
Measuring in itself is not enough however. You need to also have a benchmark. A benchmark is something to which you aspire, that will quickly let you know if you are on track, and are meeting your objectives.
After benchmarking and setting your measures, you need to plan for different eventualities. This is perhaps as important as conducting marketing research. Working out the different scenarios that your Internet Marketing efforts could face, including dismal failure, places you in a favourable position.
The truth is, you can never be too prepared. The more prepared you are, the better you can quickly react to situations: good or bad. For good situations, you can react to make them even better, the more prepared you are. And for bad situations, you can make the best of them, and at least salvage the situation.
Following this questionnaire, and making sure that you have responded in the positive for each question, I believe your Internet Marketing campaigns will fair better, and deliver. After all, that is all that is desired when you launch your online marketing campaign.
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