Step 1: Business Goals

Effectively integrate your business growth strategies and goals into your Online Marketing Strategy. Your website presence can go far beyond a brochure and can become a critical business system to support your business goals.

How many leads or sales will you need from your internet presence? How quickly? What organisation goals do you need to achieve?

• Business growth through increased sales and profit

• Marketing and sales cost reductions targets

• Marketing measurement and Return On Investment decision making

• Rankings improvement on search engines to increase exposure

Step 2: Keyword, SWOT Analysis & Web Analysis

Use Google Keyword Analysis, SWOT Analysis and Web Site Analysis to gain insights into your website and your competitors. A solid online marketing strategy gathers facts. A complete website analysis and SWOT analysis is the first insight into your market on the web. It gives you the platform to develop your business growth web strategy. Conduct your online marketing strategy SWOT Analysis across three areas:
Find your internet market through detailed keyword competitive analysis - identify market, quick wins and longer term strategic tasks
Conduct a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) comparing your own web presence with your key competitors
Review your website analytics

Step 3: Internet Marketing

Use Internet Marketing to position yourself as the only obvious choice for your prospects. Innovate in your marketing, not just product or services. Content, Design, Traffic and Sales Processes - be different to your competitors.

There are 27 pillars of internet marketing covering more than 500 tactics. Search Engine Optimisation Ranking and Paid Search Ranking are just two of these. Keep expanding your internet presence and follow these principles:

•Innovate - be different

• Positioning - Make yourself the only obvious choice

• Apply innovation and positioning across design, content, sales process and traffic tactics

• Use multiple pillars and low cost, higher return efforts

Step 4: Web site design

Look at your website the way prospects do and build your website design process, based on facts so you generate leads online and increase sales. Content structure, image use and position are just two factors of over 110 that affect your website's ability to contribute to your business bottom line.

• Is your content easy to read based on known language formulae?

• Will your website support all of the critical tasks you need to execute?

• Will your resources be able to maintain the site efficiently and effectively?

• Can it be integrated to the rest of your business systems? Eg. Inventory Management and Customer Relationship Management Systems.

Step 5: Critical Tasks

• Identify the

critical tasks that you need to execute to achieve your goals. Considerations are:

• Ensure you do what you have to do achieve the results you need

• Do your research; Competitive, Internet and Business Analysis

• Build and drive traffic through multiple online pillars, not just search engines or paid search

• Your website's capability will be the more significant factor to business results versus its "graphic design"

• Use your website to make offline marketing more effective and measure your offline return on investment

• Build a database of qualified leads so you can nurture them from prospect to client

• Use website analytics for business intelligence so you can improve

• Execute tactics across building the business, not just increasing visitors

• Use analytics to focus the sales team so they never have to make a cold call again

• Integrate to other business systems to streamline process, reduce expenses, leverage efforts for improved results and bottom line profit

Step 6: Resources

Resource your presence within the constraints you have. You can insource or outsource. Either way, ensure you know the fundamentals or you will fail. Use systems and procedures to make it easy and fast for your resources to execute your strategy.

Step 7: Internet Education

Identify the areas of Internet Education you should undertake to build your capability. Different levels of staff need different education - executive through to graduates. Some respond better to self learning, others a do it approach who could benefit from an internet marketing consultant mentor or coach.

Step 8: Processes & Systems

Identify the processes and systems you need in place to execute effective internet marketing. These systems are normally quite low cost compared to what people think. System areas to consider are:

Strategic Business Development
Marketing Systems
Financial Systems
Legal Systems
Administration Systems
Product Systems
People Systems
Quality Control and Best Practice Systems
Risk Management Systems
Systems Improvement
Employee Induction
Terms & Conditions
General Welfare
Workplace Health & Safety

Step 9: Performance gaps & Website Analytics

Automatically measure performance gaps and website analytics to gain real time insights into how to improve your business results. On average:

You will need 100 visitors to achieve 1 sale

Your bounce rate, or exit rate from the first page a person sees, should be less than 30%

People should progress through your sales funnelled content

Everything you do should have a measurable bottom line impact. Remember to factor in latency from first visit to actually contacting you. Use powerful website analytics and as a first step free, Google Analytics to gain insights into your performance gaps to improve.

Source: www.loggedon.com.au