Strategic Internet Marketing Plan- Asking The Right Questions – Part 2

I recently wrote about how important it is to ask the right questions when you’re thinking about your strategic internet marketing plan.

This article will look at the following question:

1. What are the possible solutions and approaches when it comes to implementing your strategic internet marketing plan?

Part 1 also touched on the theories from Edward de Bono about structuring your thinking so that your end result is better, i.e. your ask the right questions at the start of the process. We introduced this image to break down the different stages of your thinking. A summary of the different stages are below;

TO – Where do you want to go – what goals do you have?

LO – Research stage, finding out all you can about your goals

PO – Identify the different paths you may take to reach your goals

SO – Analysis of the different goal paths to find the best fit

GO – The action stage – you’ve chosen your path, now start executing!

Let’s take a look at the PO stage and focus on your company’s strategic internet marketing plan.

This stage of either individual thinking, or a company’s collective thinking is literally, going to make or break the success you have. The whole internet was created by this type of thinking! Google, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare – any new, ground breaking technological success stories have been founded on the premise that analysis and logic alone are not enough to creative new ideas.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons why most of the really transformational internet companies all spring from the same place – Silicon Valley! An environment exists in this special place – a place where dreams and visions are given oxygen – logic and analysis have their place, but VC’s willingly give their young dreamers the space and time to develop their ideas. I wonder is it any fluke that most of these dreamers are young when they start their new ventures?

Ok, I know I’m digressing here a bit, but for your understanding of the PO stage it’s essential that you know something. For your company to really embrace the concept of  ‘possibility thinking’ , it needs to embrace the concept of being creative. As de  Bono says, ‘Possibility always moves forward from ‘what is’

So, ‘what is’ in your company? Always doing things as you’ve always done them? Afraid of embracing new ideas? Finding it hard to get to grips with web 2.0 thinking? Running a mile from Facebook, Twitter, SEO, SEM…?

De Bono breaks down the PO or Possibility stage into three levels:

• Possibility
• Fantasy
• Provocation

Imagine that the future success of your business depends  on your company developing a new online business model. You assign your marketing manager to look at this task – how is she going to achieve this success?

1. It is possible that your marketing manager has great experience with developing businesses online

2. It is fantasy to believe that your company is going to be a massive success online without the necessary investment

3. It is provocation to say , ‘We’ll just copy the success of our competitors’ The point about a provocation is that you do not believe it at all but merely use it to move forward to a practical idea – Are there ideas we can learn from our competitors  - areas where they failed, succeeded?

Let’s take it back again to our search for the best strategic internet marketing plan for your business.

Remember you’re looking for possibilities, for ideas that will get your company closer to reaching it’s goals. Let’s look at a couple of the goals we set out from part 1 of the internet marketing plan.

• We want to build our online unique visitor traffic from 500 unique visitors per month to 5000 per month
• We currently generate 20% of our revenues from online activities, we want to double this to 40%

The first goal states that the company wants to ‘build our unique traffic from 500 visitors per month to 5000 per month’ . What are possibilities for achieving this? Let’s look at some possibilities…

• Develop more content
• Start a social media campaign – Facebook, Twitter, Blog, LinkedIn
• Release some press releases online
• Build the authority in our website – i.e. get more and better backlinks to our website
• Build our affiliate network
• Develop more partners online
• Setup and properly promote the companies listings in Google’s Local Business Centre
• Target more countries with Google Webmaster tools and Google Adwords
• Send more emails with promotions to our existing customer base
• Localize and promote our content
• Use Yahoo and Bind Ad networks
• Look to write articles in industry magazines
• Ask to speak at more seminars/conferences
• Do more networking online and offline
• Advertise in industry magazines -offline and digital versions
• Syndicate more of our content – does our company have a syndication strategy?
• …

You get the idea – there are loads of possibilities  - maybe some of them are not practical, but at this stage everything should be thrown on the table – every idea is a legitimate possibility.

The second goal states that, ‘We currently generate 20% of our revenues from online activities, we want to double this to 40%’ Let’s look at the possibilities…

• Do we know what keywords are driving traffic that converts to sales ? Find out!
• What web pages on our website are driving people away? i.e. what pages have a high bounce rate?
• Do we really test the Google Adwords campaigns we run to see what ‘Call To Actions’ work best?
• Do we do A/B testing on our landing pages?
• Do we use Google Optimiser? – see above!
• Do we have a funnel setup on our analytics package? Who’s responsible for analyzing this data?
• Who is responsible for conversion rate, Marketing, Sales, IT? Do all these departments work together towards a common goal?
• Do we meaningfully segment our web data? What insights are we learning from this data? How is our day to day business impacted by this analysis?
• What’s our overall conversion rate? if we increase it by 1% what impact will that have on revenues? How much do we have to increase it by to achieve our goal of 20% increase in revenue?
• …

The key to a successful PO stage is to throw as many ideas onto the table as possible.

Part III of this series will look at the SO and GO stage and look at the questions:

1. How to choose the right possibilities for your company
2. What’s needed to start implementing your strategy?

What about your own experiences? Does your company give enough time to the ‘Possibility’ stage?

Are internet marketing strategies rolled out without being properly thought through?

Are all possibilities really looked at?

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