23rd November 2006

Online spending has been growing at twice the rate of the high street spending for the last few years with recent research suggesting that 1 in 5 shopping hours are now spent on the internet.

Mixed mode buying is now commonplace, as customers research goods and services online often making the purchase decision outside of the retail environment.

When researching new suppliers the first stop for many businesses is the internet.

As more and more customers are using the internet as part of their purchase process it has become imperative that businesses have a well considered internet marketing strategy.

A major benefit for any business utilising the internet as a marketing tool, is that visitors to your web site arrive voluntarily, they are actively seeking goods and services like yours and are therefore pre-qualified.

How do I develop an effective internet marketing strategy to promote my business online?

Developing an effective internet marketing strategy requires a clear understanding of your current situation.

You must understand how your online offer and current internet marketing mechanisms compare to your competitors, identifying your current strengths and weaknesses.

This understanding will help you to set your internet marketing objectives.

For example. Which search phrases do customers use when searching for your products and services? How well do you rank in the search engine results pages for these terms? Can you identify your competitors strategy and does this suggest objectives to be built into your own internet marketing strategy?

Common internet marketing strategies will include search engine optimisation, search engine marketing such as pay per click campaigns, banner advertising, sponsorship and affiliate schemes. It may be useful to commission a report to understand the full picture.

Formulating your own internet marketing strategy.

A good internet marketing strategy will have a strong relationship to the core offer of a business and work to bring your products to your customers ensuring the best levels of profitability are maintained.

For some companies, particularly entertainment and FMCG brands a viral approach may suit. Extending the reach of offline campaigns and encouraging customer interaction.

For small to medium size enterprises with a local customer base, a geographic search engine optimisation campaign coupled with targeted pay per click may be a better bet.

Ultimately, for any company the best internet marketing campaign will be the one that delivers the most high quality leads or sales for the least marketing expenditure.

How do I measure which aspects of my internet marketing strategy are effective?

The benefits of any internet marketing campaign can be measured on a visitor to visitor and a customer to customer level.

If you intend to spend any money at all on marketing your business on the internet then you must track the associated web site activity to understand what you have or indeed haven't achieved.

Only by doing this will you identify where your investment is making its best return.

You can also learn where potential customers are being lost, and how to identify which customers and visitors are the most valuable.

Measuring the volume of visitors to your web site and identifying which campaigns are referring them will give you a quick measure of individual campaign success, however it is important to understand which campaigns are referring the highest value visitors.

By setting web site goals such as purchasing a product or downloading some software, a monetary value can be associated with individual visitors, it might be that campaign A generates 1,000 visitor per day but none of these make a purchase and campaign B generates 50 visitors and 20 of these do make a purchase.

I know which one I'd be investing in.

Internet marketing strategy summary.

There you have it, a short but hopefully sweet guide to internet marketing strategy.

Internet marketing doesn't have to be expensive, but what it should be is strategic. And that depends on understanding your situation and bringing the right tools to the job.

Even if you just try some things out to see if they work, that's fine. But it's important to understand through measurement what's happening and if it's not working. Because then you can change and improve it.