Defining Your Web Marketing Strategy
- Determining What You Want to Achieve
- Understanding the Components of Your Web Marketing Plan
- Allocating Your Online Marketing Budget
- Coordinating Your Web Marketing Activities
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Web marketing involves all your marketing activities that take place online. That can be a lot of different activities: Email marketing, blog marketing, search engine marketing, social media marketing, mobile marketing, and more.
With all these online marketing activities to choose from, how do you determine where to spend your time and money? Which activities will deliver the most bang for your marketing buck? And which will help you best achieve your overall marketing goals?
These are challenging questions to answer, even more so if you’re new to the whole web marketing business. After all, web marketing isn’t at all like traditional marketing—or is it? You might be surprised.
Determining What You Want to Achieve
The first step in defining your web marketing strategy is to determine exactly what it is you want to achieve from all these efforts. These are your goals, which should be both realistic and measurable.
It’s important to set realistic goals, of course; there’s no point even trying if your goals can’t be achieved. But it’s also important for goals to be numerically quantifiable and pegged to a specific time frame. This lets you objectively determine whether or not they’ve been achieved. When you’re measuring numerical goals, you either hit your numbers or you don’t; there’s no waffling about it.
As an example of the type of goal you want to shy away from, consider “having the best website in the industry.” That’s a bad goal because it’s unquantifiable—what exactly do you mean by “best website?” There’s no way to measure success.
On the other hand, if you set as a goal that you want to attract an average of 50,000 unique visitors per day to your website by then end of the calendar year, it will be easy to see whether or not you've achieved that goal. When December 31st rolls around, either you're averaging 50,000 visitors per day or you're not. It's a goal that's easy to measure.
The goals you set will then determine the marketing activities in which you engage. A more traffic-oriented goal will argue for more traffic-building activities; a more interaction-based goal will argue for more activities that involve conversations with your customers.