P
Recognize The Multichannel Effect Of The Internet –
To market any product or service successfully, you
have to know where your customers are coming from—their demographics. On the
internet, this equates to knowing where your site visitors are coming
from—the sites they looked at just before they came to yours. Why? Because
knowing what sites your visitors looked at prior to coming to you tells you
a lot about their demographics. In the end, whether you are performing old
school marketing, or today’s newer version of web marketing, you have to
know enough about your customers to cater to them accordingly.
Businesses need to approach different types of internet users with unique targeted content. One way to do this is to make available to them a series of different web experiences, each with different, targeted content. For example, you can set up your own social media websites to cater to customers who like reading product reviews written directly by consumers; or you can use product focused websites to present reviews written by professional product reviewers. Different buyers tend to believe different forms of review, from blogs to social network sites, and more. If you want to market your product properly, you need to use all of these, and more. As important, the people in your marketing department who run these sites for you need to recognize the differences in each social media environment (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn), and each media channel (smart phone, game consoles, media centers, and all of the new wireless devices), because the way in which visitors want to engage with your organization will differ according to context.
As an example, according to a recent Neilson report, Facebook users engage with and view the internet differently than non-Facebook users. Similarly, visitors accessing a company's website via a desktop will expect a very different online experience compared to when they log on via a mobile device. It all comes down to giving users what they want.
P
Offer
Relevant Content And Personalized Online Experiences –
In order to cut through the clutter, businesses need
to understand user behavior and preferences, and use personalization to
drive online strategy. Let your visitors tell you what they want (rather
than making assumptions) and integrate web analytics to obtain feedback and
improve the user experience wherever possible (whether it be via targeted
content, improved functionality, or an upgraded user interface). Recognize
too that your visitor’s online experience can be impacted greatly by offline
factors. Offering your site visitors real time offline support (think:
people and resources who are available to promptly respond to requests) is
vital to the success of your overall marketing effort, as it is to your
service offering. In this regard, embed it in your staff’s brains that the
cost of adding more internet capacity to meet your customer’s needs is low,
but your customer’s expectations of what they will find when they come to
your website(s) are high.
P Don't Underestimate The Impact The Web Will Have On Your Business – The most important thing you need to consider when organizing your company’s online presence has nothing to do with technology. It has to do with how the people who use it feel, both while they are using it, and after they leave your site. In other words, the people aspect of your website(s) is more important than the technology, pretty colors, flash animation, or all of the rest.
What do we mean by the people aspect? We’re talking about the internal time it takes for your staff to make your online presence meld into one, holistic occurrence (time, effort and resources), and the external impact a visitor has when they visit and use your site. As for what this response should be, only two words are needed to define what your web presence should do to site visitors: empower users. From all perspectives, this is absolutely critical. Don't underestimate the level of time and effort required to maintain your website and keep visitors coming back, and don’t underestimate how important it is that your site acts to empower those who visit it. Success online requires continuous improvement and ongoing effort. Above all, it takes a strategic approach—you need to know and understand your target audience, and, at all times, why they are doing what they are doing when they are on your site.
P
Build
It And They Will Come Is Not A Strategy For eCommerce Success –
Your website should be treated as a separate business
channel, supported by marketing and communications of its own. Yes, the
people who manage it should be part of your marketing, communications, and
sales department… but they should operate autonomously from the others,
except in that they must obviously report to those executives who set
corporate marketing, communication, and sales strategies. Understanding
buyer behavior and how visitors engage with your website is not something
that runs through the veins of field sales people. Yet having this knowledge
and knowing what to do with it can improve your online offering
dramatically. This means that you need technologically savvy marketing
people, of the kind that understand what drives online consumers. Why the
need for technical savvy? Because if all they know is marketing,
communication, or sales, then they won’t know how to build, maintain, and
extract gold from a database of customer data garnered from your websites.
If you don’t have a database of site visitor information, then someone in
your marketing department is sleeping on the job. Your database is akin to a
precious metal and should be used to send targeted communications to people
who have visited your sites, to boost results. The facts are simple: each
and every time a company sends an eNewsletter to its site visitors, they see
a spike in the number of visitors and conversions that takes place. Good
online marketing, communication, sales, and database managers know this, and
also know that the best results come from personalized promotions that offer
added value.
P Build A Brand, And Then Build A Community Around Your Brand – Social media offers the opportunity to drive innovation, improve the user experience, and increase brand loyalty. The fact of the matter is, social media is here to stay, and as a business owner you need to understand what it is, what it is not, how it works, and consider how your business will be involved in it. If you're not sure where to start, talk to us. We can explain to you what social media is all about, and help you figure out how to use it to your company’s advantage. Once you know what it is, plan on having to put a few people on board to make proper use of it.
Among the people you will need, or outside consultants that you should hire to do this, are those who know how to use and analyze the data that comes from the monitoring tools that social media integrates with. These tools include, among others, Neilson-buzz Metrics (a fee based service), Google Alerts (a free service), and various other search based services. Knowing how to use these will help you get the most out of your involvement in the social media arena.
One reason you need to master this area is that social media is influencing search engines in a big way, and therefore if you are not involved in the social media venue, it is likely that the key-word search and SEO money you are spending is not doing as much for you as it should be. After all, if the people who are driving up the ranking of certain key words are doing so as they look for social media sites to visit, and you don’t have one, then they won’t be going to your website, will they? And if they aren’t going to your website, then why are you spending money to get their attention?
Recognize it, social media is driving search engine results, with the effect that if your SEO expert is making recommendations based on search engine results pages (SERPS) alone, you may be wasting your SEO money. The best way to deal with this? Assign the task of mastering the whole concept of social media to someone within your company, tell them to figure out how to either increase your social media presence, or else tell them that you want them to be sure to alter your SEO approach to take into effect the frequency and relevance of your keyword activity in the social media world. In other words, if you don’t have a social media presence, make sure you back out the impact social media key words have on your SEO routine. Confused? It’s fundamental folks: utilize feedback from every source where you can get it to craft an effective online strategy and presence.
P
Measure,
Learn, Refine – If you will
allow a modern update to the old saw “measure twice, cut once,” in the
online world your dictum should be “if you can’t measure it, don’t do it.”
The web analytics packages that are available on the market today offer
unparalleled insight into your target audiences, and if you're serious about
getting a return on your investment in online marketing, then you absolutely
should not build a website without integrating analytics into it. Again,
that means you need to have someone doing this task for you; and as in most
cases, we recommend that you find someone internal to your organization,
assign the task to them, and then watch them blossom as they quickly figure
out that none of this internet stuff is all that hard. The words may be new
and strange, but the business processes behind them were invented eons ago,
when the industrial revolution in Leeds, England, took hold of the world. As
for what metrics your people should be looking at, it's hard to pick and
choose which statistics matter most. Some might say all of them are
important. Not so… as in everything else in business, after your staff works
with what is out there for a while, they will quickly find and see what
works for you. As to what is available, your internal online marketing
experts should be keeping tabs on: unique visitors, page referrers, search
engines, heat maps, pathways (to and through your website), platforms,
objective based measures, aggregated demographics, engagement measures and
KPI's. And don't let the strange words scare you. Any marketing person worth
their salary can learn about this stuff in 3 months or less, and save you
their salary in consulting fees three times over before the year ends.