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Building A Successful Internet Marketing Strategy
By: Haydn O'Meagher, Sun May 24th, 2009
How many times in the past month, in purchasing a product or service or in researching the purchase of a product or service have you responded to...
...a TV commercial, radio ad or newspaper ad?
...how many times have you responded to a direct mail piece in your letterbox?
...how many times have you used Google, Yahoo! or another search engine to meet the same ends?
...and how many times have you visited a website that you know of to do so?
Some will answer 1 or maybe 2 times in the past month to the first 2. Most will say 0. Everyone will answer several times, or perhaps much more to the last 2.
It’s clear that an effective website with prominence on the search engines and other forms of Internet marketing is critical for any business.
And, unlike these ‘outbound’, ‘interruption based’ forms of marketing such as TV, newspaper and radio ads, most forms of successful Internet marketing strategies are ‘inbound’, where people are actually seeking you out. And make no mistake, no matter how small your business and how small your target area, people are seeking your product or service out on the Internet.
Imagine that, a whole bunch of people who are actually seeking you out, arriving at your virtual doorstep, your website.
Every single day there are approximately 250,000,000 searches on search engines. There are billions of dollars of goods and services sold across the world and there are many businesses already taking a large chunk of this pie.
However, does this translate into money for small to medium sized businesses (SMB’s)? The simple answer is yes.
In the same way that SMB’s take advantage of the same media that big businesses do...such as newspaper, radio and magazine ads and so forth (they just use it in a different way)...so too it is with the Internet. The Internet is used by big business to make millions and can be used by SMB’s to make healthy profits too, it just has to be used in a different way to big business.
Internet Marketing Basics
So what is Internet marketing and what’s the basic formula for success?
Internet marketing is just marketing.
In any form of marketing there is basically a 3 step process. Firstly you define your target market. Who are they, where do they live, what are their habits and what are their needs?
Then secondly, you provide them a solution to one or more of their needs. Your product or service.
Thirdly you need to communicate to that market that you have a solution to their need. Previously you may have used a local newspaper or radio ad, a yellow pages listing, maybe just an A frame outside your place of business to communicate this. In Internet marketing the only difference is the medium you use to communicate to your target market that you can fulfil their needs.
After a target market has been selected and a product/service has been decided upon to meet their needs the formula for marketing success is:
Leads X Conversion Rate = Customers
In Internet marketing Leads are created through applications such as:
Search Engine Marketing (comprising of Search Engine Optimization and Pay Per Click ads)
Email marketing
Affiliate marketing
Blogging
Social Media
Your Conversion Rate is calculated by how many Leads you get to visit your website turning into an ‘Action Response’. What is an ‘Action Response’? It’s whatever action you want your website visitors to take when they visit your site. And that leads us to...
Your Websites Goals
Why are you heading into Internet marketing? What do you want your website to achieve?
Do you want to sell more product in your store? Do you want to start selling product online? Do you want to develop leads that you can call? Do you want to persuade people into thinking about an issue in a different way?
The answer to this question is very important as it dictates how you design your site and also how you market it.
Whatever your websites goals, what you want is as many Leads as possible and as high a Conversion Rate as possible to get as many Action Responses as possible?
Most small business goal for their website is to sell online, offline and anywhere else they can. It doesn’t matter what it is, but be sure to define it as it will help later on down the track.
Test, Refine, Test, Refine
Internet marketing for small business is very similar in many ways to Direct Response marketing. One of the great things about Direct Marketing, and Internet marketing, is that you can very easily improve what you’re doing.
Once you’ve set your goal for the website you’ll need to try a campaign out, test the results of the campaign measured against your websites goals, and then refine what you’re doing and test it again to see if you get a better response or not.
Every time you do this you can make incremental improvements in your Internet marketing success.
In fact Internet marketing is possibly the easiest form of marketing to do this in. It generally takes very little time to change an offer or a headline or any other part of a campaign.
It’s also very easy to measure exactly how many visitors are coming to your site from different campaigns and how many of them are responding to your website. This is a critical part of any Internet marketing campaigns success.
The best Internet marketers aren’t geniuses. They just measure what they’re doing and make small improvements on it time after time. Every time you make these small changes it is part science and part intuition, but the ones that aren’t working as well are culled and the ones that are working well are continued and improved upon over time.
The formula for Internet marketing success is Leads X Conversion Rate + Customers. However, you can’t send leads to a webpage that doesn’t exist. And so, this is where we’ll start.
Developing Your Website: Getting a high Conversion Rate
“Develop my own website? But I have no idea about that sort of stuff. I’m no designer.”
The amount of times I’ve heard this from someone who goes on to create their own successful website astounds me. The fact is, even just knowing what you’re about to read here, you’re way ahead of 90% of website designers out there. Because the important thing isn’t knowing how to use intricate web design programs to make great looking websites. They key is knowing how to get a response from people who visit it. And there’s so much more, and so much less to it than most people think.
First off visit this site http://www.haydnomeagher.com/drwd and check out it’s link at the bottom of the page to see just how easy it is to design your own website. It really is a matter of writing, clicking and dragging and not that much more.
I, very deliberately, designed my own site http://www.haydnomeagher.com using a very simple website editor and my background is certainly not in design at all.
The 3 Basic Elements That Get High Conversion Rate websites:
1. Immediacy of recognition
2. Value
3. Clarity of what to do to get that value
1. Immediacy of recognition
What is meant by this is that a visitor has come to a particular page on your site for a reason and they need to immediately recognize that this page fulfils that reason. In fact within approximately 1-2 seconds.
An example of how it should work: someone types in 'foldable bicycle' into Google. You have appeared in Google with the title 'foldable bicycle sale', they click on it and the headline says 'Foldable Bicycle Sale'.
If they landed on a page that said 'Bicycles For Sale' and they couldn't find a foldable bicycle within a few seconds, the back button is very easily reachable and will be clicked.
So the searcher needs to know within 1-2 seconds that they have landed on a page that will most likely assist in fulfilling their need at that point in time. So make this very clear and choose your landing pages for a particular campaign very carefully.
2. Value
An Internet marketing genius I personally know once said:
"What is value? If you answer that question you will be rich".
What is value? Well now you've read How To Build An Internet Marketing Strategy you've picked your target market and so you will know exactly what value is to them. Person A might find that $3,000 to buy a set of customized golf clubs is of great value...person B might not even think $1 is good value.
How value is built in a website varies greatly depending on what you're trying to get the person to do and what you're selling.
3. Clarity of what to do to get that value
Now the visitor has seen that you might be able to fulfil their need within 1-2 seconds, you've built up value in their mind and they are pretty much ready to take action. Make it very clear what you want them to do next and make it as easy as possible for them to take that action.
If you want them to 'Buy Now' make sure you put this in 20 point type and have a link to an easy to use shopping cart or payment system. If you want them to fill out an online form make it very very clear.
For a full eBook on Direct Response Website Design please visit http://www.haydnomeagher.com/drwd
Developing Leads
So you know your target market, you’ve got a product/service that fulfils one or more of their needs and now you even have a website up and running. Time to sit back and wait. Well, nothing will happen unless you get qualified Leads to visit your website.
Here are the giants of Internet lead creation:
Search Engine Marketing or SEM (Search Engine Optimization and Pay Par Click ads)
Advertising
Email marketing
Affiliate marketing
Blogging
Social Media
And the giant of all giants for small business is Search Engine Marketing or SEM. These Leads have everything that good about the Internet built into them:
...These leads are ‘Inbound Leads’. That is people are actually seeking your product or service out. They are arriving at your virtual doorstep and inquiring about it. They are not being interrupted with an ‘Outbound’ ad that is interrupting them in what they are doing.
...They come in great numbers. There are approximately 250,000,000 searches every day on the search engines. And many of them are for products and services that small businesses offer. No matter how niche your product or area of service you can get seen on thousands of searches per month, and many of them will click on your listing if you’re in the first 3 listings (I’ll show you how to get listed there).
...You can send them to a particular page for a particular message, you can test
and refine what you’re doing over time to improve it bit by bit and you can measure
everything you do in great detail.
If you’re not putting time and effort into Search Engine Marketing (SEO and PPC) then
you’re not serious about generating business through Internet marketing.
Now...SEM for small business is very different from big business. Does the local dentist
need a search term like ‘dentist’ that is seen all over the country and very, very hard to
compete in? No way. The keywords that are targeted by successful small business SEM
campaigns are very different. You need to go through step 1 above and define your target
market to be able to pick the right keywords.
SEM is a very big subject and one that I’ll take you through step by step in my eBook Search Engine Marketing For Small Business. It’s available for download at http://www.haydnomeagher.com/seo
Where To From Here
Internet marketing can be, and is currently being, used by small businesses to increase profits. It’s such a useful marketing tool that any small business not using it is missing out on a huge opportunity.
Many small business owners opt out of the Internet because of a lack of understanding and therefore will not tackle it themselves. Also, because of this lack of understanding they do not want to depart with their hard earned money and outsource the project when they’re not sure who to turn to, or what they should be seeking in a professional.
The materials and the accompanying software on my website have been designed with small business in mind and therefore are in a step by step and easy to follow fashion. Have a look at them and start utilizing the world’s ultimate marketing tool, the Internet, to send your businesses profits skyrocketing.
Haydn O’Meagher
http://www.haydnomeagher.com
