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What should my online marketing strategy address?
There are just SO many variables to consider when planning my online marketing. What features and tactics should my strategy absolutely address? How did you start developing your strategies?
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3 Answers
@Ron's answer earlier was excellent - a couple of additional suggestions:
1) Make sure you can track what your are doing; ensure Google Analytics is set up for your site and familiarize yourself with basic measurements, Keyword Rankings (top tier and long tail), Bounce Rates, Time on Site, Pages Viewed, Traffic per time segments for analysis, etc.
2) Your content strategy should be Web 2.0 centric; meaning, cross promote all content such as your Blog, Twitter stream, Images and Videos across all digital touchpoints. For example: integrate your Blog posts, Twitter and SlideShare Accounts with your LinkedIn profile.
3) Set up multiple accounts with Bookmarking services (Digg, Reddit, Tumblr, Yammer, Plurk, Jaiku, etc); then use Ping.FM to automate and cross promote your content www.Ping.FM.
4) Make sure all of your videos and images via Flickr, YouTube are properly annotated for search engines (both for internal and external views); meaning, Titles, Descriptions, Keywords.
5) If you are going to utilize Video Marketing; syndicate your Videos on third party sites using www.TubeMogul.com - YouTube has huge market share, but secondary sites will provide good traffic as well.
6) I'd build a site on WordPress if I were you; it's a powerful platform with a built in CMS (Content Management System) there are tens of thousands of plug ins that extend its functionality, thousands of templates to save you money on design, very SEO friendly and you can of course Blog easily.
7) Try to incorporate Keyword focus in your content development. You can develop a funnel list of these that is say 50-100 Keywords and use these across your content development and syndication processes.
8) Make sure you incorporate a call to action in your content (pages, Blog posts, contact us page, etc.) - "click here" means people will click when others wont' - it sounds silly but adding calls to action will drive your conversion rates.
9) Use Google's free Webmaster Tools (when you set up your Google Account) and you have a Dynamic XML site map (Word Press has great plug ins) in place on your site and a Privacy page. Both of these will help you drive much more search traffic.
10) Blog often with good content - don't get lost in the woods with it; just start out and write the best content you can and don't worry if every post is excellent. Yes, strive for the best you can be, but getting out there in the fast lane is better than sitting on the sidelines and striving for perfection.
Here's how you would start:
1. Define your Goals & Objectives - what do you want to accomplish
- thought leadership
- brand awareness, pure hits
- customer conversion, monetization
- competitive differentiation
2. Set measures and targets so you know how you're doing (click-through rates, cost per click, bounce rate, etc.)
- see: http://www.conversationmarketing.com/2007/09/7_internet_marketing_metrics_y.htm
- use google analytics and/or sitemeter to track
3. Presence
- start with your design goals (easy, consistent, relevant, fresh)
- sort out your channels (Facebook, google ad words, twitter, linkedIn, foursquare, digg, blogs, youtube, etc.)
- see what your competition does, and look at the brands you admire
4. Content
- start with themes based on your business or value-proposition(s)
- get it out there, cross link it (tweet about your blog, etc.) - Leverage what you have
- get others to carry your content and/or link to/from it
- keep it out there (get interviewed, blow your own horn)
- make sure you join 3rd party conversations (eg: comment on blogs and link back to your content)
5. Make it better
- employ search-engine optimization techniques
- get guest contributors
- tweak based on the variance to your targets
Here's a good article I just came across the other day: http://www.ducttapemarketing.com/blog/2010/11/18/27-ways-to-view-the-web-beyo...
(BTW, I'm going to tweet about my response, it will be my 999th tweet in 2 years!)
While writing your online strategy, you should take a few steps back, and answer some questions about your business: why are you in this business? what unique purpose does your business serve for your customers? What will your customers lose if you went out of business?
These questions will give you an insight about what's so unique about your business. You can then get a good idea of who your customers are. Understand their demographics well. Find out where they hang out online. Find out how they like to be communicated. Find out what are the problems they are facing.
With answers to all these questions, you have a goldmine of information on which you can base your online marketing strategy.
This information will help you develop features and tactics in your online strategy that include: best websites to promote your business, best tone/style of communication, best form of communication and so on.
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