Strategic Internet Marketing Plan – Asking the Right Questions! Part 1

What makes an internet marketing strategy strategic? What are the key elements that will set your business apart from your online competitors?

This post is for anyone with responsibility for their company’s marketing strategy and for evolving their company’s marketing tactics from traditional strategies to implementing a strategic internet marketing plan.

As the person responsible for marketing your company’s business, are you sticking to what has always worked? Are you starting to dabble with online marketing, maybe Google Adwords, maybe some Social Media forays.  Perhaps your hand is being forced or you’ve already run an unsuccessful internet marketing campaign.  

Probably one of the biggest indications that your internet marketing plan is not strategic is if your company is implementing your online and off-line marketing campaigns separately. This may manifest itself by different departments being responsible for key elements of your online strategy, or the online marketing part of the marketing plan being given lip service.

Does the marketing manager/executive feel comfortable with their new responsibilities? Have they developed/owned an internet marketing plan before? Have they successfully implemented a cross department/cross organisational strategic plan? Does something like this even exist in your company, i.e. do different departments traditionally work well on collaboration projects?

You may have the IT department responsible for the hosting and architecture of the website, the marketing department responsible for content, the sales department looking after the leads generated from your website – do they all work together towards a common goal?

Strategic Internet Marketing Mix

This series of articles looks at how you can align all elements of your marketing activities, both off-line and online so that they are all focused on delivering one message and delivering real results for your company.

I have broken down the marketing landscape into four areas. For some businesses online advertising may be more important than for others and others still will find that off-line promotion is still their primary engagement marketing medium.

When you come to evaluate your current marketing position it’s important to at least look at all four segments and cross reference with your target market. If your company’s research indicates that social media is not going to drive engagement then maybe your activities in that space will be limited – at least for the moment.

Thinking About Your Strategic Internet Marketing Plan

When evaluating each of the four quadrants I suggest you use a structured approach to  your thinking. You want to ensure that any bias, personal or cultural within your organisation does not unduly influence the results of your strategic analysis.

I suggest you use something along the lines of Edward de Bono’s Five Stages of Thinking. I use some of his techniques below to summarise one approach to developing your strategic internet marketing plan, but I highly recommend you get his book, Teach Yourself to Think and read it for yourself.

TO: Where do we want to go to? Your answer, in our context, may be to say, ‘We want to develop a strategic internet marketing plan so that 40% of our revenues are being generated from online activities.

This is quite a large definition so let’s break it down in the context of the strategic marketing mix in the image above.

We want to set goals that are driven by metrics and are measurable against the overall purpose. The purpose is very important element of your overall thinking. As k yourself the question, “Why does our company want to move our marketing strategy more online?”

Are your customers more likely to be buying online? Has your product range evolved so that it can now be bought online? Are you doing it because all your competitors are moving online? Are your traditional marketing efforts proving too expensive?

Some metrics you may be considering might include the following..

• We want to reduce our off-line marketing costs by 20% (e.g. marketing spend on newspapers and magazines ads, radio, TV)
• We currently generate 20% of our revenues from online activities, we want to double this to 40%
• We want to reduce our overall marketing budget from 100,000 pa to 60,000 pa.
• We want to reduce our traditional marketing head count by 2
• We want to develop an in house competence in online marketing
• We want to build our online unique visitor traffic from 500 unique visitors per month to 5000 per month
• We want to ensure that all departments are aware of and aligned to the achievement of our online marketing goals. Each departments KPI’s will be measured against their contribution to these goals.

Warning!

Don’t be tempted to just say, er we want more traffic, or we want more authority in our website. Woolly goals lead to failure.

LO: This stage is about gathering information, as much information as you can, from whatever sources you can that will make your task of making a decision at the next stage easier.

The classic way of obtaining information is to ask questions and there are two types of questions that you should be thinking about asking;

1. Fishing Questions are opened ended and explore areas where we’re not sure what answer we’ll get back.In the context of our Strategic Internet Marketing Plan you’ll need to be asking yourself the following type of questions:-How do we start building in house competence-
   What is the best online ‘channel to market’ that we should be using to  to promote our product/services? E.g. Social Media, Organic listings, Pay Per Click…etc
2. Shooting Questions will illicit a quantitative answer…

- How much money is being spent by our target market online?

- How much will it cost us to target our selected keywords using Google Adwords?

- What areas need to be cut to to reach our target of a €20,000 savings pa ?

- What areas of Organic Search do we need a strategy for? This last question may be helped by exploring the diagram below:

The additional types of shooting questions you need to ask of your internet marketing plan are:

1. What is our strategy to get listed in the organic website listings?

Data Feeds Google SERPs

2. Are we listed in Google Local Search?

3. Do we optimise our images and with what keywords? Does each of our images have a unique name that contains a keyword, or is it named something like 1245homepage.jpg?

4. Do we have a Twitter account? Who’s responsible for it? Do we have a set of guidelines for it’s use? What content can we promote?

5. What social media accounts does our company have? What type of content is published on these accounts? Do we manage these account in house or have we outsourced to an agency? Are marketing and sales coming their activities on these channels to market?

6. Do we have a policy for online press releases? Who writes them?

7. What websites do we syndicate our content to? Do we have a content syndication strategy? Do we have a content development strategy?

8. Have we ever developed a video to promote our products/services? Do we have a YouTube channel? Should we have one?

Strategic Internet Marketing Plan – Overview

Your goal after going through the TO and LO stages is to be in a position where you can answer the following questions;

• We know what goals we are working towards i.e. we have defined and developed our company’s Strategic Internet Marketing Plan
• We have looked at many sources of information that will help us to define the possible solutions and approaches to achieve our stated goals.

What we have now is that foundation for your Strategic Internet Marketing Plan;

Strategic Internet Marketing Plan Process

Part II of this post will look at answering the questions:

1. What are the possible solutions and approaches when it comes to implementing your plan?
2. How to choose the right possibilities for your company
3. What’s needed to start implementing your strategy?

What about your company?

Does  your company have a strategic internet plan?

Was there a lot of thought put into developing the strategy, or is it a haphazard approach with no one really taking responsibility of either setting or attaining key online revenue goals for your company?

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