The Importance of an Internet Marketing Strategy
“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Albert Einstein. Laying the foundation for your business’s success is absolutely critical to everything that follows after that. If your strategy is sound, you will succeed.
Your Internet marketing strategy is critical for many different reasons when it comes to the success of your business. One of the important reasons why having a plan that you can count on to guide you to success is because of how much competition you encounter in your niche or industry. Undoubtedly, you are only one of many people who are offering what you are offering. It is extremely important that you find a way to stand out above the crowd in a unique and exciting way. Remember that it isn’t enough to just have a website, even if it is the most beautiful and informative website that anyone has every laid eyes on.
Once you have the website, you need to show and tell other people about it. Marketing your web presence means that you need to find a way to attract traffic, focus on your target market, and ultimately get other people to buy what you are selling. Your wonderful website won’t mean anything to you if you can’t succeed at getting people to come to you. There are some very specific goals that you need to have in mind when it comes to your Internet marketing strategy.
Your objectives online
From the very beginning (even before your website is even in existence), you need to clearly understand your goals for your online success. Your goals need to be clearly established and outlined up front. If you have the situation where you have an existing website already and you identify goals and objectives that will not be supported by that website, you will need to identify how to make your website work with the new strategy in mind and execute those changes as quickly as you are able to. Make sure that the changes that you make to your website are completely aligned with your objectives. It is, of course, easier to align your website and your objectives if the website hasn’t been built yet. However, it is not impossible to make things work even if you already have a website.
Your main objective: Your main objective should include customer service and product support, a sales area for your products and/or services, available company information, product and/or service information and building your brand so that both the brand and the company benefit equally.
Your secondary objective: Your secondary objective should include search engine optimization (SEO) and be friendly to the search engines, your website should induce people to want to return to your website, people should be encouraged to share your offerings so that the information goes viral, the capacity to send Emails and other forms of communications to your visitors (permission marketing), and it must encourage your website traffic to become loyal and have a connection with you and your business for a very long time.
Choosing your target markets
It is essential that you choose your target markets as soon as possible. Your website should contain something enticing that will encourage your website visitors to keep coming back to you. Remember that your target market should be segmented based on the needs, wants, and expectations of your visitors. You must excite them as much as you possibly can.
Your strategy
Your offerings online must be very well established. Your products and/or services may be the most amazing that ever existed; however, if you don’t use an effective marketing strategy, you won’t end up where you want to be. It is critical that you construct your Internet strategy with your products and/or services in mind.
Conclusion
Your Internet marketing strategy is critical to the success of your business. Without the strategy in place, as well as clear-cut objective, you will have a much more difficult time staying on your path and realizing tremendous success at the end of that journey. Your strategy doesn’t necessarily need to be complex. In fact, simpler will work better in a lot of cases. Always remember that relationships are at the center of your success and the more you interact, the stronger your relationships will become.
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Via LinkedIn Groups
• Group: Business Writers of America
• Discussion: The Importance of an Internet Marketing Strategy
I agree on the importance of having a strategy. We had one for and hit over 25,000 page views in 75 days.
Posted by L. A. ‘Tony’ Kovach
Via LinkedIn Groups
• Group: Linked-N Bergen County NJ
• Discussion: The Importance of an Internet Marketing Strategy
Isn’t Internet Marketing a tactic not a strategy? The Marketing Plan would be your strategy.
Posted by Raffi Jamgotchian
Raffi,
Great question, thank you. Various aspects of Internet Marketing would be considered either tactic or strategy. In general tactic is for short (immediate) term while strategy is for long term. With this in mind, Internet Marketing using PPC or AdWords would be considered a tactic while Internet Marketing using web content such as blogs and Inbound Marketing would be considered a strategy.
Via LinkedIn Groups
• Group: B2B Social Media
• Discussion: The Importance of an Internet Marketing Strategy
The idea of an internet marketing strategy seems a bit outdated to me. With the ubiquitous nature of the internet, everyone already has a presence online. It seems more important to me that companies need to focus on building a better business strategy and then figure out how that strategy can be executed online.
What are your overarching business objectives? How can the internet help businesses to achieve those objectives? We work with a lot of clients that think about the internet as a whole new business – when really it’s just another channel that should be considered as part of the mix when planning your business’s success.
Don’t get me wrong: it’s a dynamic, versatile, and trackable medium – but having strictly online objectives that don’t dovetail with the objectives of your business is a recipe for a disastrous online setup.
Posted by Greg Cohen
Via LinkedIn Groups
• Group: B2B Social Media
• Discussion: The Importance of an Internet Marketing Strategy
That feels right to me, Greg.
It all has to start with business goals.
Rather than an Internet-specific strategy, we think there is a place for a Content Strategy — and there needs to be some common sense structure to this.
Posted by Doug Kessler
After I initially left a comment I appear to have clicked the
-Notify me when new comments are added- checkbox and from now on each time a comment is added I get 4 emails with the same comment.
Perhaps there is a way you are able to remove me from that service?
Thanks!
Philippine Technology, Done.
Aw, this was a really good post. Spending some time and actual effort to generate a great article? but what can I say? I procrastinate a lot and never manage to get anything done.
this is such a great blog to read, very informational and presentable., thanks for sharing this one to us.
Great Post. Internet Marketing maybe outdated for some but somehow it still works but strategically planned. Very informative and well thought article. Will surely share this post with my colleagues at Synechron. Thank you for sharing.
This is so important! Going forward, all marketing campaigns will include Internet Marketing. Even local businesses attract and engage with customers on the Internet. So-called “social networking” sites are unbelievable sources of targeted audiences!
The basic advertising framework laid out by Mr Ogilvy in the last century has not changed. but the media through which it is implemented has radically altered the game and democratized the playing field.
Is strategy important in marketing? Obviously it is. If all marketing going forward is or includes Internet marketing, then it behooves one to have a well thought-out strategy.