Want to Know if Your Internet Marketing Strategy is Successful? Ask Yourself These 3 Questions
If you don’t need new customers, don’t need repeat business from customers, don’t want to increase your business revenue and profits, and don’t want to build the bottom line value of your business, then feel free to skip this article.
However, if you need any or all of the above, then please read on.
I have heard many business owners say, “Now that my website and social media accounts are set up, all I have to do is sit back and new customers will start rolling in.” However, the phone doesn’t ring, the emails don’t start pouring in, and there are no new customers walking through the door. And we get stumped, trying to figure out where we went wrong.
I have discovered that we don’t look at our online business presence from a high enough vantage point. As business owners, we need to view our internet presence from 30,000 feet, not from ground level. By looking at the bigger picture, we can identify the resources and online marketing channels that work best for our business and optimize them. We’ll also gain a deeper understanding of the steps we must take to reach our marketing goals.
Let me ask you: is your Internet marketing strategy successful? Can you give me a confident thumbs up? If you’re unsure, then ask yourself these three questions:
1. Do You Understand Your Leads and Customers?
Your leads and customers are everyday people with problems, needs, and challenges. They have pain points that your business might be able to address. Determine how your business can be uniquely positioned to meet your leads’ and customers’ pain points. Accomplishing this requires some research and hard data to draw insights from. It also means that you have dig deeper into the psyche of your leads and customers.
You could start by creating buyer personas that take into account customer demographics, behavioral patterns, motivations, and goals (among other factors). Once you have a deeper understanding of your leads and clients, as well as their pain points, you can craft your online marketing campaigns, channels, and strategy to deliver solutions to them at the right place and the right time.
Your understanding of your leads and customers and their pain points should determine the kind of content you’ll be creating, the platforms you’ll be using to distribute your content, the type of social media accounts you’ll be using, and even your overall brand image.
2. Do You Have Clearly Defined and Measurable Conversion Goals?
What do you want your leads and customers to do once they click on a paid or organic search result? Click on a post on Facebook or Twitter? Follow a link on your blog post?
In short you need conversion goals. Do you want them to call you? Send you an email? Buy your product or service from your website? Subscribe to your service? Donate to your cause? Sign up for your newsletter? Download a whitepaper? The list goes on. (You also need to track and measure your conversion goals using analytics software and other tools.)
Once you’ve identified your conversion goals, you need to create separate conversion funnels to drive leads and customers to specific actions. Create different landing pages for specific conversion objectives. You should also optimize your landing pages by performing methodical A/B testing.
In short, you need to define your conversion goals if you want to get measurable, concrete results.
3. Do You Have an Established Marketing Budget?
Ever heard of the adage, “It takes money to make money”? The same principle applies to your Internet marketing strategy. You need to establish a clearly defined marketing budget to fund all your marketing endeavors. This budget should be revised quarterly or annually to adjust to changing market conditions and customer needs.
Generally, if your business is new, 25% of your anticipated revenue should be set aside exclusively for marketing. If you are an established business, on the other hand, 10% of your revenue should be set aside for marketing.
Tom Dongilla
What excites Tom about his business is providing the tools and education to help make your business thrive. Tom is dedicated to helping your business get to the next level, no matter where you are today.
Tom lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He has one child graduating from Penn State in 2015.
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