Internet marketing includes all sorts of components and the complexities of understanding your target audiences, trends, new technologies, new ways to engage online… it can be exhausting to any internet marketer. Last week we focused on putting your online “house” in order. Cleaning up all the moving parts, examining the traffic and establishing the benchmarks. No it’s time to come up with a strategy that works for you and your organization.

Internet Marketing:

The term “internet marketing” consists of old-school traditional search engine marketing, traffic analysis, link exchanges with high ranking related web sites, posting and linking back from related web sites, online advertising, etc. This post will focus on three easy areas for you to focus on to generate the most targeted traffic to your site.

Blog Marketing:

The purpose of a blog is to update visitors to the site on a regular basis. The blog should encompass more than company-centric content and more on your industry as a whole, broadening your SEO capabilities, enabling RSS registration, and providing a web destination that is empirically recognized as the place to go for information on industry-related topics, segmented by your company’s main product offerings. Short articles of interest to visitors, links to other sites of interest, comments and responses to industry announcements, etc. should be scheduled on a at least a weekly basis for B2B marketing, with a higher frequency for consumer marketing.

Explore rich media such as webinars, video demos, films, interviews of your staff – humanizing your company, providing faces to go with names, goes far when engaging your customers and prospects.

Let’s talk a second about content. It can be re-used, but it has to be done smartly. What I’ve done in the past is have different copywriters re-write the same content for different purposes. A blog post can be extended to become an article for distribution. An article can be augmented to become a white paper. Using infographics and video are other ways to share the same content in different formats. Short paragraphs from any of these items can be linked to the rest of the content on most social media and blogs. Think about how you can reuse what you already have.

Email Marketing :

Persuasively written personalized email campaigns are far more effective than traditional direct mail campaigns. Opt-in email newsletters are an inexpensive yet highly profitable way to contact customers and prospects on a regular basis to announce company news, product launches, staff introductions, industry-related news, job openings and more, without the high cost of printing, postage and labor to process a printed newsletter version. This process describes a one-to-many distribution method. Before the internet, it was always a many-to-many distribution which resulted in people having different versions of their latest contact with you. Now, you have control of who sees what when. You can even have a membership-driven pre-announcement version for those who pay for the privilege.

Marketing can send email messages in any format including text, html, embedded graphics and attachments. Monitor and analyze your email campaigns with reports to learn who reads the emails and who clicks through to your web site.

Email Alerts and List:

Using an email marketing tool such as Relevant Tools, you can send email alerts to all the registered users informing them whenever a bulletin or announcement is uploaded to the site. This can also be used for regularly scheduled email newsletters directed to different target audiences, such as prospects, press/media, Spanish speakers, etc. This will cut down on costs and help in the timely broadcasts of information to those who request it. The list should be updated automatically as soon as a visitor enrolls to receive the email.

Social Media Engagement:

There are three constructs to social media engagement:

1. Publish
2. Share
3. Network

Social Media: The Publish Construct

• Publish Everything You Have Anywhere We Can
• Monitor What’s Published About You and Promote It
• Promote Flattering or Useful Content from Others
• Empower Customers to Publish or Review

Social Media: The Share Construct

• Anyone Can Promote Anything to Anyone
• Monitor What’s Being Shared About You and Make More of It
• Find Where Your Target Audiences Hang Out and Engage with Them Through Comments, Advice, Links
• Promote Your Content and Others Content
• Produce Useful Content for Your Audience to Share

Social Media: The Networking Construct

• Anyone Can Connect with Everyone from Anywhere
• Make Friends
• Find Your Existing Connections
• Network Through Online Groups
• Add a Request to Connect to your Email Signature, Blog Posts, Bios and Profiles
• Be Helpful and Provide Free Advice and Support
• Answer Questions
• @tag Connections with Interesting Content

Social Media Activities:

• Develop Consistent, In-Depth Profiles Across All Social Networks
• Meet People and Start Conversations
• Ask Questions – Trust Others’ Advice
• Add Value to the Community

Benefits of These Activities:

• More Effective than Live Networking Events and Cocktail Parties
• No Boundaries of Time or Space
• Other People Can Listen in Easily

Measuring Results

If you’re not measuring your progress, you will never understand what’s worth your time. LinkedIn could be a complete waste of time for your product or service. Your videos may be blowing up the internet, but you have no call to action to get people to visit your site or buy something. Since you benchmarked your numbers before you started this, you can easily measure the change based on each post, update, video, infographic, etc. that has been part of your content mix. The results to measure should be:

• Blog Subscribers & Visitors
• Inbound Links
• Facebook Fans & Activity
• Retweets
• Other Metrics to Pay Attention To:
  • Video views on YouTube
  • Friends on Facebook or LinkedIn
  • Upvotes for Blog Articles
  • Number of Comments on Posts in Forums
  • Upvotes on Answers on Quora

Do you want to outsource this type of work so that you can focus on higher level activities? Subscribe today to learn more about building your business and receive a free PDF “Process Plan for Creating Your Own Innovation Program”. Feel free to email us to learn more about how we can help you grow your business.