Choosing Effective Programs for Your Internet Marketing Plan
Objectives, strategies, and tactics (i.e. programs or action plans) - these are the parts of a solid strategic marketing plan. Your site objective defines the big picture, strategies provide the framework, and tactics fill in the details. Tactics are where the action takes place - these are the things you will do to bring your plans to life and "work" your marketing mix. There is no shortage of Internet related marketing tactics. Many have great potential. The challenge is to sift through and choose the ones that are right for your situation - the ones that have the greatest potential to support your strategies and, together, incorporate all elements of the four p's. Randomly ricocheting from one "proven technique" to another will frazzle and disjoint both you and your business. Examples of promotional tactics are numerous, as are sources of advice. Public relations, search engine optimization, affiliate programs, reciprocal linking, advertising, direct email, newsletters, and customer incentives are all promotional tactics that may be appropriate for your plan. A key to knowing which tactics to choose involves thoroughly understanding your target markets and your positioning relative to each. Other elements in your marketing mix (price, product, and place/distribution) come into play as well. Once you have addressed these strategic issues, you will be better able to choose tactics with the most potential to increase your business. Target Market A target market is an identifiable group of people that could benefit from purchasing your product, visiting your site, and/or responding to some other call to action. You can define your target market(s) according to some combination of behavior, demographics, psychology, and/or social influences. You are likely to have several potential target markets; focus on those you can most profitably help. Marketing to a target market involves understanding how you can help them, developing effective messages, then reaching them via appropriate tactics that use all of the four p's. By using this approach you can focus your marketing mix resources on tactics that are most likely to increase sales for your business. Hence, earning the greatest return from your marketing activities.
Positioning Positioning defines your product, business, and/or site for those in your target market. It sets the stage for your image - how your target market perceives your business - and shows your market the benefits you provide. The positioning process involves first understanding the needs and wants of your target market. You should also know the positioning strategies of your competitors and have a thorough knowledge of your own product's features. Armed with that information, you can better develop tactics that will most closely fit your positioning. Another factor to keep in mind is your online positioning will be tightly interwoven with your off-line positioning. Because your business and products are a reality in both the physical and virtual worlds, your positioning should be consistent across both. Accordingly, your marketing tactics should be consistent as well. The Four P's:
Price, Product, Place, and Promotion Too often, we tend to focus on "promotion" to the detriment of the other marketing mix elements. When choosing tactics for your Website marketing plan, consider *each* of the four P's (4 P's) in your marketing mix - price, product, place (distribution), and promotion. You are likely to find the results much better than if you include promotions alone. The opportunities for incorporating all four P's (4 P's) into your plan are numerous. You may find, after studying the competition, that increasing or decreasing your price is likely to result in better profits for your business. Perhaps there is a distribution channel (electronic delivery or mailorder, for example) you haven't fully integrated into your business. With respect to products, developing a new product or giving an existing product a facelift may be an effective business-building tactic. By considering the Four P's (4 P's), your target market(s), and positioning, you can be better prepared to choose effective tactics for your Website marketing plan. Once your tactics are chosen, you are ready to begin implementing and evaluating results. Bobette Kyle draws upon 12+ years of Marketing/Executive experience, Marketing MBA, and online marketing research in her writing. Bobette is proprietor of the Web Site Marketing Plan Network, http://www.websitemarketingplan.com, and author of the marketing plan and Web promotion book "How Much For Just the Spider? Strategic Website Marketing For Small Budget Business": http://www.HowMuchForSpider.com
Related News
|
 |
|
|
RELATED ARTICLES
Internet Marketing: 10 Killer Internet Marketing Tips To Multiply Your Sales
Hello, do you feel low because sales at your website
is down?
Seven Marketing Questions You Should Ask Before You Get A 10 Year Old To Build Your Website
Google tells us there are 4 billion websites- almost one for everyone on the planet. And today you have decided to make it 4 billion and 1. So, do you think- "If I build it, they will come?" seriously? It ain't going to happen, unless you stand out. So do you think your 10 year old nephew who can code html (which I believe they now learn in pre-school, just after they have done the alphabet) is going to make your site the next eBay? Let me give you a few questions to ask yourself before you double his pocket money.
10 Ways To Increase Your Ads Efeectiveness
The current climate on the internet is very unfavourable to the small business
operator. All forms of advertising are becoming blocked, or too expensive.
Email is becoming difficult to send, and even more difficult to ensure
it arrives at its destination due to spam filters.
Ads on sites are being blocked, popups are blocked by peoples browsers, and
it's taking more and more effort to actually get noticed if you do make it
into view.
So what's the internet marketer to do to advertise on a budget these days?
Well here are 10 tips which could help you to get your ads and your
business noticed.
Online Sales : 10 High Decibel Tricks To Magnify Your Sales
Online sales is like a fine art and you have to learn the
ropes on how to convert traffics to buyers.
Truth and Lies
How low can one get? The number of encounters I have had in the few months as a network marketer with liars is astounding. Why do people need to stoop to lying in their attempt to succeed? Do they really believe that they will attract customers by using deceptive means. Hey friends, I've got news for you! You are the ones who have been deceived!
Beware the Click Without the Conversion
Why is this funny?
The Five Golden Keys To Massive Passive Income
You can earn a large monthly passive income with a minimum knowledge of the Internet, sales or marketing. In fact, you don't even have to have a website to be successful.
To Make the Most Dollars, Make The Most Sense
The world of Internet marketing isn't all it's cracked up to be. In fact, it can be a brutally cold one. Believe me, I learned the hard way.
Making Money from Websites - Common Pitfalls of Beginners and How to Avoid Them
Making money online is really easy to do because the entire world is becoming Internet savvy with a preference for shopping online. Because of this fact, you need to make sure you are doing your best to meet the needs of individuals online and increasing the internet traffic coming to your website.
Dollars In The Details!
When it comes to your marketing message, the little things count. Trouble is, you'll never come to respect how much, until you make a commitment to science.
Cheap & Easy Online Marketing
A successful online business takes more than a website?a lot more! When I ask people if they have an online business, many people tell me they are creating their website. That's good news except I get the feeling they think that is all they have to do to have a successful online business. Nothing could be farther from the truth!
Guide To Free Advertising
When I first started my internet home business, I realized that in order to make money I would have to bring visitors to my website. I didn't have a lot of extra cash laying around, and my mentality at the time was "Why would I pay for it, when I can get it for free"? So, I starting searching the internet for places that would accept an ad for my product for free. I was very happy to find literally thousands of sites willing to accept my ad.
Online Sales: 10 Mind Boggling, Electrifying Tricks To Ignite Your Sales
Do you want to unleash a tsunami of sales at your website?
Beginner?s Guide To Free For All Sites (FFAs)
For those of you who don't know what an FFA site is,
it's basically a website where you can post a link/add
to your website for free. Generally it is also posted
to many other sites at the same time and hopefully
somebody sees your link...free advertising in other
words. When you post a link, you are also giving
permission (whether you know it or not) to receive
confirmation e-mails back from the site owner.
What is Article Marketing?
Simply put article marketing is advertising your web site through the use of articles. This choose of advertising is preferable over others for the simple fact that it's free. There are many article directories that allow you to submit your articles for free. They allow you to have a resource box at the end of your article that you can plug your site and products with. Not only that but if you're into building links this is a great way of doing it. If your article is chosen by publishers they will republish your article on there websites giving you even more publicity and exposure. A well written article can give you massive exposure.
Avoid a Summer Sales Slump
Did you ever see the movie "Terminator 3" by Arnold Schwarzenegger?
Remember when the machines took over the controls and began to
terminate society as we know it?
Selling to Sellers - Utterly Stupid Idea or Not Quite?
The list of promotional tools and resources available to online marketer today is
very impressing, and new ones appear almost every day, each fancier and more sophisticated
than ever. Almost all of them however are touched (some will
even say "cursed") by a sort of the original sin. After all, after SPAM became criminal
offence and as the result direct email marketing became all-but-impossible, the only
people who see your offer are those who are also trying to sell something.
Every thinking person involved in the Internet marketing must have noticed this
disturbing fact. Most marketers evidently try to forget, after having classified it
as some modern version of the ancient Achilles and the Hare paradox - intellectually
sound perhaps, but not really applying to the real world. Other escape into "niche"
markets where you sell to "normal people" i.e. not-marketers. Which of course is
a perfectly valid and often profitable option. But is it really THE ONLY rational solution?
Is it really not possible to sell to other marketers and be successful in that?
In my opinion this "selling to sellers" is not at all as absurd as many people believe.
It's simply different. And I often wonder why so little has been told about this difference
by the experts. Because to me it seems to be the most important aspect of your
marketing, the most important initial decision: "Will I be trying to sell
things to people at large? Or perhaps will I concentrate on selling tools, resources and
information to marketers?". And even the obviously important question of tangible vs. intangible
merchandises doesn't seem to me more crucial.
There are two main branches of Internet marketing. They are, as I will soon try to
prove, very different but none of them is "absurd", "stupid", or by definition unprofitable.
Of course, there are many more branches. Whether you're selling tangible or intangible
goods is perhaps equally important. I don't know. In any case it's much more
obvious and widely understood. (That's probably because selling of tangible goods is as
old as the humanity itself, and in it the tested methods of the post-order selling still basically rule,
though of course adapted to the virtual reality.)
Let's now give those two categories some short, simple names for the use of this text. How
about "X marketers" (from eXternal) and "N marketers" (from iNternal)?
The X marketers will be those selling to the "world at large", and N marketers will be those
selling to fellow marketers.
Now, an explanation is needed. When you start your marketing career you don't usually
"decide" whether you want to be X or N marketer. It's mostly determined by the promotional tools
you have access to at the beginning. If you start without any investments, or only with little
ones, you will be using opt-in lists, traffic exchanges, FFA pages and similar resources. Then,
by their very nature you start promoting to people who see those ads, and who are those people?
Of course they are other marketers using the same tools! You have become an N marketer without
even giving this issue much thought. (It can be noted that you are an N marketer trying to sell
to other N marketers. Selling to X marketers seems a much more difficult matter, for they don't
use the same promotional tools, or at least not in the same extent. You will need to be
somewhat of a Guru to start selling to those people!
No doubt there's lots of common between those two branches. After all "the money is in the list",
and the really big profits come from back-selling to people who have already bought from you,
are satisfied, trust you and therefore are willing to buy from you more. This part of your
business will be fairly similar, no matter if you send to marketers or non-marketers.
There are also important differences of course. If it wasn't so our distinction would have little meaning and
so the this article would have no meaning. But those differences are very visible. let's
start with the language itself. If you are an N marketer and are
successful, have a list of many thousands happy clients and so on -- then you will be soon called a "Guru".
If, on the other hand, you're enormously successful in selling let's say 2' x 3' stainless-steel widgets
(or ebooks on painless, well-fed & lazy slimming for that matter), which of course means that you are
an X marketer, then, even if you have thousands of faithful clients with deep
pockets, instinctively reaching for their credit Platinum cards whenever they hear your name...
Well, you will of course be admired and envied, not to mention rich, but you won't be called a Guru!
You might be called something like "a Great Salesman", which is not too bad of course, but it's not the same,is it?
Another difference is that
in N marketing you don't usually speak much about "niches". Selling memberships in credit based opt-in lists
from some external point of view can be seen as much "niche marketing" as selling, let's say...
polishing-wax for pet anacondas. Not true? But I personally have never heard this term used in this context.
The most important differences are however in how X's and N's find their clients in the first place.
Or sometimes how they let themselves to be found by them. This is not just a play with words,
as search engines do exactly that --
they let people find your offer, don't they? There are of course many different types of search engines
and similar systems ("normal" search engines, Pay Per Click search engines, directories etc.) but from
the viewpoint of the potential client they basically do the same thing. And for the X type marketer
they are nowadays one of the very few available means of promotion. Of course it's in large part because
they are very powerful tools, providing you with highly targeted hits. If you're
able to get high position on those search engines that really matter (and don't get bankrupt on the way, as they
tend to be costly) you're almost there. Add some off-line promotion and you're on
your way to become The Great Salesman. (Of course all other aspects of your business also must be
done right.)
If however you have decided that selling to sellers doesn't sound so absurd or pointless as it is often
presented, then your options are much more numerous. Which is a good thing of course, though your
competition also has the same options, so it's not an unmixed blessing. You must show your offer
to marketers, so you need to show it where marketers are looking for offers. Why should they be looking?
There are two main reasons.
The first reason is that they simply are forced to look at your offers. How? Why? By whom?
It's simply that many, if not most, of the methods of online promotion
available today base on the principle reciprocality. Which in this context means: "I will take a look at yours
if you agree to take a look at mine". Yes, of course, you don't always have to actually look at those offers.
Often you can pay the service to show your offers to others and ignore theirs.
Still, the people who will see your offer will be those who want
to show theirs to the world. (Of course they don't necessarily need to be commercial offers, they can be sites devoted
to hobbies, charities, private or group obsessions etc. But they all want to SHOW people something rather
than SEE somebody else's offer.)
Does anything positive result from this fact? And, to pose a much broader question: does the marketer
trying to sell to sellers (N marketer in our terminology) have any advantages over the one trying to sell to non-marketers
(X marketer)? My answers would be: YES and YES. Why? There are a few reasons. Some of them pretty trivial though
not without importance, like the fact that marketer usually is much more exposed to contact with offers
from online businesses.
Marketer also has some needs that can possibly be satisfied by buying
things online. Two sorts of needs in fact. Firstly, the same needs that everybody else has. Secondly,
specific needs related to Internet marketing. By being rather more exposed to Internet ads and offers
than an average person, more used to it and understanding it better, marketer would probably buy more
things online. But the other type of needs is far more important here.
Now for the second type of needs. Marketer will need marketing tools, resources, information...
These things change and develop in an enormous pace. This is of course a truism but it's absolutely
true. If you're able to quickly find new promotional tools, opportunities and/or information
on Internet marketing, you will be in position to sell (more or less directly, we will not
plunge here into discussing downlines and referrals) these information - for after all it is
exactly information! - to other marketers. I personally see no reason why marketers should be
less receptive to this sort of information than average person. In fact they are probably
much more receptive, as they know perfectly well how much in their personal lives depends on
those tools, information and opportunities.
It is probably not true that whole 95% of people trying to earn online is not earning any money, but
it must be obvious that most marketers still have not found their way of doing business online and
there's no reason to believe that this situation ever radically changes.
So it's not only information on new available services and opportunities that is sought after,
and therefore sellable. In order to be successful in this sort of business, where there's so much
available information, potential chances and risks, and so little road-signs that can be fully
trusted, one needs to find their own way. Way of doing business online.
Human life being as short as it is, with most often very limited finances (or you wouldn't spend
your time in front of the monitor with uncertain result, would you?), people who still haven't
found the right method and attained real success in online business will need a "recipe", or,
perhaps better, a successful person to help them -- a teacher, or even perhaps what the Americans
call "the mentor". (There's this old joke about some American children asking their parents to
pay them tree-climbing lessons, but Internet marketing without qualified help is a dreary and
very risky thing to do.)
If you already are successful, then being the N marketer you have serious advantages. One of them,
perhaps the most important, is that you only deal with one (big, that's true) issue: online marketing.
As X marketer you would need to handle both marketing itself and the market niche you're in. This
fact has some further interesting effects. For example this that by attaining success as N marketer
you're becoming a Guru, or "almost a Guru", and this time I'm using this term without irony. What
I mean is simply that you've become an accomplished expert in your field, which of course is
Internet marketing. While if you attait even the biggest success in selling widgets online, you
will be a "Great Expert In Selling Widgets Online". Which means that you will be generally seen as
a crossing between "widgets expert" and "marketing expert". Nobody will be certain how good you are
in any of those two parts of your activity! Effect of which will be that your success will be
much harder to duplicate! You will have much more difficulty in teaching people your tested business
methods. If they are not going to sell widgets like yourself, nobody can be completly sure it's the
best marketing practice that you're teaching. And the widget niche may be too small to accomodate many
new players. It will be a totally different matter with general marketing knowledge that you obtain practicing
N marketing.
One special advantage that N marketing has is something that I personally call "self-propelling money machines".
So far they are not very numerous, at least those that work smoothly and bring tons of money without
constant need for adjustments and pushing. But there are some, pretty successful. And their will be more.
What are those self-propelling money machines? They are smart combination of promotional resources with selling.
One could say that they are resources that sell themselves, automatically. The simpler form cosists of just two
main parts: the Lead Generating Module (more often multiple Resources) that are constatly being sold by something that
can be called the Selling Module to the leads they generate. One program that I remember that worked like that was
CommisionSpyder. In another, more advanced, version is probably best represented by the new "Explosive" ebook by
Stephanie L. Woolford, a very successful online marketer. (This ebook can be for example found on http://ebiz-guru.com.)
Here one can three conceptual modules:
the Lead Generating Module, the Selling Module, and an ebook (that can be either free or paid) that ignites the
whole process. I'm not sure I managed to describe the idea clearly enough, but it can be understood when seen in action.
Ebooks are supposed to be the almost-perfect business and in near future they may really become that. If we assume
that this statement is true, we can say probably risk an opinion that X marketers have greater chance of publishing
a competent book on topics related to their chosen niche they know lots about, while N marketers seem to have much
greater chance of publishing purely marketing ebook, "viral" ebooks, and ebooks of the sort mentioned in previous
paragraph included. Which seems to be another advantage of N marketing. So after all Selling to Sellers may not
be so stupid idea, wouldn't you agree?
How To Actually Make Money In Network Marketing
Most people that I know who are, or have been in network
marketing, never seem to make a dime! Others (myself
included) make a small fortune. If you're not doing VERY
well with your business, and you're honestly putting in
the effort, let me explain to you how to turn things around!
If You Build It They Will Come - Not Without Web Marketing!
I'm sure everybody has received an email from a company promising to get their website placed first on all the major search engines. Maybe some of you have even tried these services or may be thinking about it right now.
The Internet Marketer
The internet marketer is really a perfect profession. This profession allows you to gain many positive characters. You become more responsible, you learn how to earn money in your home business, how to make it professionally and treat your customers in a way you wanted them to treat you. We have to keep in mind one very important thing that marketing on the internet is different from marketing in real world in some aspects. You may ask why? So, the difference is a little hidden and can't be seen at first.
|
