Wednesday, 17 December 2008
10 Steps To Effective Online Marketing
Step 1 – Start with the end in mind
What’s the purpose of this campaign, what results do I want to see at the end of it? This has to be crystal clear in your head otherwise you won’t really know if you’re succeeding.
Step 2 – What’s the hook?
What will you build your campaign around? Brand attribute, service innovation, special promotion? Are you setting the foundations of a longer term strategy for your brand? Launching a new product or just trying to boost monthly/quarterly sales with an aggressive promotion. Figure it out and make it central to your ad development.
Step 3 – Which online channels?
Display? SEM? Viral? Social? Decide which channels you want to drive your campaign through. Ideally you want to combine a few tactics to give your campaign a richer texture. But keep in mind that different channels are like different tools each has their purpose. A big, bold branded display ad campaign will generate a lot of awareness, but might not immediately drive conversions. Search engine advertising on the other hand isn’t ideal for generating awareness (people are usually there with something in mind already. But combine the two and you have a very powerful campaign.
Step 4 – What do you need to launch?
New banner ads? New SEM ads? New SEM keywords? New webpages? Amend existing pages? Landing pages? Make sure to pay attention to details. Peer into the nooks and crannies of your online real estate and make sure you feature your ad campaign consistently.
Step 5 – What’s your post-click strategy?
What are you doing with the ‘clicks’ you generate? Are you driving them to your homepage? To a specific landing page? To a conversion point? Don’t make the fatal error of just pumping everyone through to your homepage, it’s too messy and contains too many messages to effectively convert traffic from a specific ad campaign. At least direct users to a more specific page on your website, or create customised landing pages where you can feature your ad campaign. You want users to feel like you have greeted them appropriately and acknowledged that a specific message brought them to you.
Step 6 – Are you tracking it all?
This is a step a lot of people fall down on. Is the tracking all set up and working? Are you tracking the right things? Impressions and clicks alone don’t cut it. Beware of analysis paralysis too, figure out the key metrics that you want to measure and make sure they are measurable for all traffic sources.
Step 7 – Launch imminent
Are you ready to launch? Is everything in place? Are customer services, sales, tech support aware of your campaign? There will always be people that call/email to ask about an ad so make sure you’ve spread the word within your company.
Step 8 – You have lift-off
Everything is in place, now time to get it up and running. Do some final double checks to make sure your ads are appearing where you want them to be appearing, and all clicks etc are working. This is especially important if you’re running rich media campaigns with interactive ads. Just because it worked when you tested it, doesn’t mean it will work perfectly live.
Step 9 – Feedback loop
Once you start getting some data in on your marketing campaign performance, you can start to develop a picture of what’s working and what’s not. Probably not a good idea to be too impulsive here and rip out any ads, but you’ll at least be able to get some early warning signals.
Step 10 – Evasive manoeuvres
Hopefully you’re online marketing campaign has gone 100% to plan with absolutely no problems what so ever. But in real life, there probably have been some issues. Maybe a certain ad placement isn’t working, your landing page isn’t performing as well as it could be, maybe you haven’t explained some aspect of the new offer clearly (sales and customer services keep getting asked the same questions etc). The point is you need to be flexible and adapt to any changes.
· · · · · · · · · ·
