In this day and age, being good at online marketing is a must for any small business. The art and science of online marketing involves using the reach of the internet and social networks to generate awareness, traffic and leads and then to convert those prospects into paying customers.

So whether you’re an online retailer or operating a local off-line business you’ll need to have a clear strategy and system for getting people to visit your website, capturing their contact details so you can build a list and begin a relationship with them and then nurturing that relationship until they are ready to buy from you.

10 Steps to Effective Online Marketing

This tutorial is designed to get you up and running with the basics of online marketing for small businesses in ten easy lessons. Here’s what we’ll be covering:

1.    What’s In A Name? Establishing Your Brand Identity and Web Presence

2.    Developing Your Online Marketing Strategy – Failing to Plan is Planning to Fail

3.    Light at the End of the Sales and Marketing Funnel ?

4.    Traffic Generation -The Holy Grail of Online Marketing

5.    SEO Voodoo – Keyword research

6.    More SEO Voodoo – Link Building

7.    The Low Down on Pay per Click Advertising

8.    Blogging for Business – Got Something to Say?

9.    Let’s Get Social

10.  Conversion Optimisation – Closing the Deal

Just like any offline marketing, your online marketing efforts need to be planned. It’s not enough to have a website that is no more than a glorified brochure or simply replicates your offline product offers. Nor can you randomly tweet, blog or email (the spray and pray approach!) and expect to get results.

No. If you’re going to be successful you will need a clear online marketing strategy and plan of action. This involves:

• Setting your key marketing objectives and metrics
• Identifying the customers you are going to target and defining your online value proposition
• Understanding your online marketplace and how well positioned you are to compete in it.
• Determining which elements in the online marketing mix are going to add the most value to your business and give you the best return on your investment.

In this second article in the Online Marketing 101 series article we’re going to look at each of these steps and explain why failing to have an online marketing strategy and plan is planning to fail.

Setting your marketing objectives and metrics

Before you get started with online marketing it’s essential that you invest some time thinking through how you are going to use it to support your key business objectives, the outcomes you want to achieve and how you’re going to measure and track your progress. Here are some examples of the types of metrics you might want to track.

Reaching More Customers

If you’re looking to reach more potential customers in your local market increasing your visibility in local online search results (business directories and Google Places) might be your key priority. Your key metrics would include your page rank for your main keywords, the amount of traffic to your website, where it is coming from, the number of first time visitors to your website or profile page, number of online reviews and ratings etc. If you’re using pay per click advertising to drive traffic to your website you’ll want to know what your click through rate is (the number of people who click on your ad), your most responsive keywords and average cost per click.

Engaging Your Visitors

If you’re already getting lots of traffic to your website but most visitors quickly leave and never come back your objectives might be to engage first time visitors by offering valuable content that encourages them to stick around a bit longer and give them reasons to come back. In this case you would want to track pages viewed per visit, how long visitors spend on your site, actions taken, the percentage of returning visitors and blog subscribers.

Lead Generation and Conversion

You may have healthy website traffic and lots of people who come back repeatedly but you’re not generating many leads and sales. In this case your objective might be to get them to take some action, such as opting in to your email list, downloading some free resources or a discount voucher or submitting an enquiry and then converting them to paying customers. Your key metrics would focus on actions taken, online enquiries, email opt-ins and your conversion rate (the percentage of leads that turn into sales).

Nurturing Relationships

If customer retention is your biggest problem or you want to persuade your existing customers to make more frequent or higher value purchases or refer new business your priority may be finding ways to nurture long term relationships. In this case you would want to measure your email click rate, number of repeat log-ins, number of blog subscribers, blog comments, Facebook fans and Twitter followers.

Defining your target markets and audiences

Defining your online customer is as important as defining your products or naming your business. If you have not yet already done so, you need to build up a detailed profile of your ideal customers and decide the best way of targeting them. There are a number of ways to do this – for example you could develop personas for different types of customer or you could segment your audience based on where they are in the customer lifecycle (e.g. new visitor, returning visitor, first purchase, inactive customer). The important thing is to be clear about who your audience is, what their motivations, buying behaviours and preferences are so that you can communicate with them in a way that will elicit the response you want.

Your Online Value Proposition

Once you have a clear picture of your target customers the next step is to develop a distinctive and compelling online value proposition that spells out clearly the benefits that your customers can only get from you online. This must clearly address benefits which are of particular value to that group of customers and answer the “What’s In It For Me?” question in their minds. Make it specific and avoid the temptation to try to appeal to everyone or you will end up attracting no-one.

Click here for more detailed guidance on developing a compelling online value proposition.

Understanding your Online Marketplace

So you’ve set your objectives and defined your target audience. Now you need to turn your attention to understanding what is happening in your marketplace and how well placed you are to compete.

Think about how your online marketing strategy is going to address any key issues that face your business such as changes in the way your customers search for your products or services, new online or off-line competitors, emerging social trends and technologies.

SWOT Analysis

Compile an inventory of your strengths and weaknesses. For example:

• Is your website search engine optimised? What’s your Google page rank for key search terms?
• Do you know your key web metrics – how many visitors, how they find you, how long they spend on your site, which pages they look at, how many leave without taking any action?
• Does your website have a means of collecting visitors’ email addresses? How big is your email list? Do you regularly communicate with customers and prospects by email? If so what’s your response rate?
• Do you have a social media presence – e.g. blog, Facebook fan page and Twitter account? If so, are you building a loyal fan following or does no-one listen to what you have to say?

Finally, compare your online value proposition with that offered by your direct and indirect competitors. How distinctive and compelling is it and what are you offering visitors to your website that they can‟t get anywhere else? Are you giving them strong enough reasons to choose to do business with you or is this something that needs attention?

Identify your optimal marketing mix

Your strategy defines how you are going to use your online marketing presence to drive your business forward using all of the different tools that are available to you . So now you understand what you want to achieve, your target audience and the online landscape the next step is to develop a high level plan setting out the key initiatives you are going to take.

Since no small business has unlimited marketing resources, its important at this stage to prioritise them on the basis of:

• Their importance to your business success
• Your capability relative to your competitors

This will ensure that your strategy is focused on what’s most important in terms of achieving the objectives you have set for your business. You may find it helpful when carrying out this exercise and ask yourself which activities are going to give you the most bangs for your buck: ie. which 20% of potential actions are going to deliver 80% of my objectives?

The 3 critical boxes you must tick

To break online marketing down to its simplest level there are three key things you need to do to be successful online so unless your online marketing has already evolved to a highly sophisticated level everything in your plan should be ticking one or more of these boxes:

1. Generate traffic

2. Build a list

3. Convert the people on your list to paying customers

The problem of course is that there are so many different ways of achieving these objectives that small business owners often get overwhelmed. Should I focus on organic search or use pay per click advertising to drive traffic to my website? Which keywords should I target? How much effort should I put into social media marketing? Which social networks do I need to have a presence on? Facebook? Twitter? LinkedIn? All of them? Should I concentrate on blogging, article marketing or video marketing? What about mobile marketing?

Why most businesses fail at online marketing

The single biggest reason why small businesses fail with online marketing is because they don’t have a clear strategy but hot on its heels comes the failure to follow through. So the trick here is to be ruthless in your prioritisation, deploying a small number of carefully co-ordinated and mutually reinforcing strategies that are going to directly contribute to the key outcomes you want and executing them well.

If, for example, reaching more customers is your key priority focus on getting your website in order, optimising your web pages and directory listings for a small number of important keywords so you have good visibility in search results, developing some great content in the form of your blog, videos, free reports etc. and establishing your main social media outposts so you can get it in front of the widest possible audience.

If engagement is your priority you will want to concentrate on building up your blog subscribers and encouraging people to interact with your content more by including useful tools, quizzes, polls and competitions etc. Cross promoting between your website and social media profiles will also feature prominently.

Is your objective getting more leads or improving conversion then your priority is going to be establishing a lead capture mechanism such as a free report, building your list and using email marketing to keep your business in the forefront of your prospective customers’ minds until they are ready to buy from you.

If nurturing existing relationships is your key objective, either to increase customer retention or long term customer value, your marketing mix will probably place heavy emphasis on online marketing and social media marketing to promote special offers and other benefits for your fans and followers.

Integrating your online and offline marketing

Not every customer will be comfortable doing business with you online and many will want to interact with you in different ways at different points in their customer journey so consistency matters. For example, a customer may have a preference for buying in person but find it helpful before visiting your store to refer to the more detailed information about your products and in depth FAQs on your website. They may want to check out comments on your user forums, read independent reviews or share views with Facebook friends prior to committing to a purchase and address questions to you by phone or email.

Offline media will be an important driver of online traffic to your website, which means that a significant focus for your offline marketing should be to draw customers‟ attention to the additional value (content, products or deals) they can get online. Make sure you include your website’s URL on every piece of printed material that you provide to customers, prospects and media. That means every brochure, business card, catalogue, annual report, press release, thank you letter and event flyer. Use offline marketing to drive your online marketing.

This is the second article of the 10-part “Online Marketing 101“ series.  From here we’ll examine in more detail all the key concepts in online marketing and the tools and approaches that are going to be most useful for small businesses .

Go back to the Online Marketing 101 series.

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