Online Marketing: An Approach

Introduction

Marketing has traditionally consisted of the four "P's" of Product, Pricing, Promotion and Place. Deciding on the marketing mix based on these criteria has been the traditional marketing function. The marketing mix arrived at also determines how the communication is arrived at.

 However, these are from the seller's point of view, and are applicable to older marketing models. In the current market scenario, the consumer is the king, and from his point of view, the decision to purchase your product or a competitors, depends on his perception of value offered. The decision will be made on the basis of answers to the following Questions:

 

The above questions represent four dimensions based on which a consumer will decide whether or not to buy your product. This customer centric approach, called SIVA, is how the product needs to be positioned in the consumer's eyes in order to elicit a favorable response. 
 
Effective communication can provide a winning combination for marketers, and for this, marketers need to use communication strategies which reinforce each other. Since the Internet is the most prolific source of information in most markets, your communication must be especially effective in the online medium.
 

Online Marketing 
 
As the preference of consumers towards the online medium increases, it is beginning to emerge as an important medium where purchase decisions are made and influenced. Since inputs for making decisions are freely available online, and the user has ready access to such inputs, it's beginning to emerge as a preferred medium. As a result, the efficiency of an online marketing plan has started playing a large part in the overall success of a marketing endeavor.
 
Unless your online marketing plan is laid out with all the factors decided before hand, and is implemented in stages, the chances of such a plan succeeding, however well made, remain slim. There are two parts to a successful online marketing plan - the components of the plan i.e. the plan itself, and the implementation of the plan.
 
While designing an Online Marketing plan, there are two key components that need to be taken into consideration - your site itself, and the process of getting people to your site. Both the factors have to have an underlying strategy in order to effectively influence purchase decisions.
 
The site itself needs to be dynamic to reflect changing content, and should be connected to enough channels to funnel in a stream of relevant visitors. And your plan for getting consumers to your site should cover what will interest them to click on your Advertisement and come to your site.
 
Once designed, the plan itself should be implemented in three stages - Initiate, Involve and Improve. The Initiation phase will consist of getting all the components of your site, and your campaign to attract visitors into place. This phase lays the ground work for you entire plan. The Involvement phase will consist of application of the plans, and enrolling people into your cause. It leads to funneling the right consumers to your site. The improvement phase consists of examining reports on activities done, the results, and analysis. It also involves reducing unnecessary spends and streamlining marketing to what actually works online.

Initiation
This phase consists of defining the strategy behind the website. Unless your site is created with an underlying strategy, it will not affect the bottom line. Some questions that need to be answered are -

Content related decisions

• How content will be organized - from a site visitors point of view, making it easier for the visitor to access the information he needs
• What contents will be displayed on the site landing page, and what section it will link to, as well as what reflects on the page a visitor comes to after clicking on a link
• How the content will be organized visually, to highlight key differentiators and aspects of your product which makes a favorable decision easier to achieve
• Frequency and procedure of content updation to prevent errors from occurring
• What methods of requesting for a demo or more information exist, how user friendly such mechanisms are, and what happens to the leads captured by such mechanisms
• What will be the procedure for reviewing content on the site in order to improve site rankings on search engines? How will updates be carried out to ensure high ranks in search engines? How will review of content to be updated occur?

Performance related decisions

• How will you measure your sites appeal and success? By leads generated? By visitors?
• How will you analyze and understand analytics reports from your website? What reports will you need to determine efficiency? How is it going to be related to the bottom-line?

Associated micro sites

• Will there be any micro sites? How will their existence affect your main sites performance? How will they link to it?
• What is the objective behind establishing a micro site? How is it different from your main site? How will you measure your micro sites performance?

Lead generation activity and visibility decisions

• Will the marketing plan lead to mailer campaigns? What will be the frequency of such campaigns? How will the database be sourced? How relevant is the database? Do you have permission to mail your eDM's to the database?
• What Social networking sites will you provide visibility to your organization on? Is the activity and user profile of such a site likely to cause pertinent leads to be generated? What are the messages to be sent out to other users on such sites? Will each message have its own landing page?
• What directories will you submit your site link to? How will it help? What is the expectation from such directories?

Unless you answer the above questions and more - depending on your plan, you will not be able to implement your online marketing plan efficiently and correct your site's performance. 
 
Involve

This phase consists of contacting people and getting them to enroll in your cause - whether it is for purchasing your product or positively recommending your product. This phase will consist of decisions on -

Search Strategy

Non Paid Search

• What are the pages that come up for different sites?
• Are these pages relevant according to what is being searched for?
• Is your consumer using the same the keyword or phrase that you are optimizing for?
• When your page shows up in results, what is the title for that link?
• What is the content that shows on the search engine page under the link? Is this content going to get your consumer to your site?

Paid Search

• What are the Adwords that you are showing ad's on? Do your ads appear as a feasible alternative?
• Is the content that shows up on these ads relevant to what the consumer is actually searching for?
• What page does the ad lead the consumer to? Does this page provide relevant content as per the ad itself or is it something totally different?
• Does the content on the landing page help a consumer to take a decision?

Social Strategy

Site related

• What are the sites that will be used by employees nominated for social marketing and networking?
• Is the profile of the site members suitable to the target audience you want to talk to?
• What is the possibility of business leads coming from the site?

Nominated employees

• Who will lead the Social marketing aspect of your campaign?
• What are the messages that will be sent out?
• What are the standard replies to various questions they may face?
• Should you have a company account on social networks?
• Will people nominated use their personal ID's or professional?
• How will leads be generated? Who will follow up such leads?

eDM campaigns

• How many mailers will be created?
• What is the schedule they will be sent on? What's their frequency?
• Who will be responsible for delivering these mailers on schedule?
• What are the mechanisms for information exchange that will exist on the mailer?
• Who will be the target audience for your mailer?
• What are actions expected of the consumer upon receiving this mailer?

Driving micro sites

• What are the methods that will be used to drive your micro site?
• What is the message that will be put up for your consumers to read?
• Why should they participate/visit your micro site?
• What is the advantage they get from joining your endeavor?

Improve

This phase consists of streamlining your marketing activities, and restricting your spends to what actually works for your plan. It involves decisions on -

Analytics

• What are the analytical tools that will be used?
• What are the criteria that will be used to evaluate performance of the different components of the marketing plan?

Evaluation

• What are the criteria?
• How is the performance of each component against these criteria?
• What is the spend on creating and publicizing this component?
• How has it helped?
• Is the return worth the investment made in terms of time, effort, and monies?
• How does it measure up against the other components?
• Should I continue with this component or stop it?
• What are the sales that have occurred due to your online campaign?
• Are they justifiable against the investments made?

Adapt

• Is the entire campaign worth the investment? Or should you be doing something else?
• Is the message you are putting out appealing to consumers?
• Once these questions are answered, you can recognize the components that work and the ones which do not, and adapt accordingly.

Summation
Each aspect of your marketing plan is a key component, whether offline or online. Each activity should complement the other activities. This medium has the greatest potential to succeed, and to show constant and instant measurements. However, you plan needs to be executed flawlessly, and should be measured constantly to reduce any deviation from plan.