Digital Internet Marketing

In the rapidly changing world of marketing, even if you don’t do anything else, you should have at least two key objectives to be successful with any size of business:

• Make sure that your message is reaching the right audience
• Ensure your marketing initiatives are meeting performance goals  

The key to achieving these two objectives is a well crafted Digital Internet Marketing System.  Today, it is a given that the internet must be at the centre of your marketing strategy.  The internet is the medium that lets you maximize the measurability, return on investment and relationship building efforts of your business. But in order to take advantage of the power of the internet, you need the right solutions and processes in place to unlock the information it holds in store for you.

Profitably Acquire New Customers

Paid search marketing, usually referred to as Pay Per Click (PPC) has emerged as one of the most effective channels for reaching potential customers and is a key element of an effective Digital Internet Marketing System. According to Forrester, paid search spend has grown from $7B in 2006 and will reach $11.5B in 2010.  Paid search marketing is complex because managing an increasing number of keywords across different networks means you need to profitably scale your paid search investment. It’s also important to determine the impact search has on your offline demand.

Measure and Optimize for Success

It is important to measure Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) consistently.  You need to have a common language to communicate across your organization which drives towards the same goals. As part of your Digital Internet Marketing plans, it is also vital to measure all of your campaigns together, whether you’re measuring a PPC keyword buy on a search engine, an email marketing campaign, a banner ad and so on. You must consolidate your multi channel performance data into a single consistent Digital Internet Marketing System framework of metrics that lets you make decisions with confidence.

Strengthen Customer Relationships

The internet enables you to target your customers more effectively. In the past, data has been largely aggregated and therefore impersonal.  With new technology and system that is all changing and digital marketers are making the most of better analysis to segment their customers and create customized email marketing campaigns that resonate with them. They are providing better customer service by understanding the visitor behind each visit, and developing targeted online and offline marketing programs based on the preferences of their customers.

Web Analytics

Google Analytics and other web analytics packages, when properly configured, implemented and managed help measure the above and go a long way to supporting your Digital Internet Marketing System and can help you answer the following key questions:

• Which marketing campaigns are generating the most leads and customers?
• Which keywords are driving most of the visitors?
• Which pages on the website do customers find the most engaging?

Digital Internet Marketing Systems – Step One is a business website

Business owners and leaders should be carefully examining all items of discretionary spend and evaluate them, line by line, to ensure they have potential to grow the business and can demonstrate unambiguous Return on Investment (ROI).  In some organisations, in times of a downturn marketing and advertising spend gets classed as “discretionary” rather than as an investment necessary to grow the business. The advantage of Digital Internet Marketing over more traditional off-line marketing is that the impact can be more easily measured. An effective internet marketing strategy will enable businesses to increase marketing ROI whilst being able to directly track marketing investments with measurable and incremental results. An innovative business website is at the heart of an effective internet marketing system, regardless of the products and services that a business sells.

In this series of articles we will discuss some of the more important benefits of a business website. The first important benefit is visibility. It is the shop window into products and services and is the online business card. Your company and its products and services need to be visible to your target market. Prospects are actively searching on the Internet for your products and services – especially where the market is local. Recent studies have shown that 80% of buyers rely on Internet search as their primary source of information before making a buying decision. Businesses that rely solely on traditional printed ads in yellow pages, local classified ads and word of mouth are missing a large part of their target market.

As more and more businesses and individuals use the Internet to research products and services before buying, companies must provide online prospects with easy access to company products and service information. Online buyers have now come to expect  24 by 7 access to information. Let’s look at the example of local restaurants where customer behaviour is markedly changing.  It is now critical that local restaurants have a internet marketing system that includes a website to engage and inform customers about opening hours, address, location, driving or walking directions, updated menus, email contact and a phone number so that customers can email or call to make a reservation. More and more customers are planning their restaurant meals online and restaurants without business websites miss out on potential customers.  Trend searches on Google in the UK clearly show a peak in local searches in December and January as customers begin to research restaurant bookings for Valentine’s Day and Mothers’ Day.

All business websites must have clear goals and that support the business’ objectives. As a minimum, companies going online need a domain name that is relevant to their business and an email address with the same domain name. Free email accounts from Yahoo, Hotmail or Gmail should be avoided as they dilute business credibility. Also, email from these domains is often blocked by spam filters due to the large amount of suspect emails that get classed as spam.  It is also important to budget for basic website traffic promotion via search engine optimisation (SE0), and pay per click (PPC) and social media (SM) advertising to ensure that the website is visible to online searches and receives targeted traffic to the website.

For the vast majority of businesses, the objective will be to increase sales and grow margin through an improved marketing ROI effort.  A business focussed website then becomes a necessity and not a “nice to have” accessory.  The good news for businesses today is that in the digital age there are a number of affordable internet marketing systems available where the business website is at the heart. The cost varies depending on the level of initial and ongoing support a specific business requires. Having a Digital Internet Marketing System does not always differentiate a company  from its competition, but it does improve visibility and hence the chance to compete for those online customers  that might otherwise be lost to the competition.

Anthony Burke is an digital internet marketing consultant with experience of business development, marketing and the Internet with many large companies – more recently Hewitt Associates, Xchanging and Axa Insurance and several key London Market Insurers. Anthony now runs his own business which is associated with WSI to provide companies with affordable digital internet marketing solutions to enable profitable growth and increase marketing ROI.  He is also a member of the British Computer Society and a registered Prince2 Practitioner.

Today’s economic climate

Deep into the recession it is very easy to make cutbacks in marketing and advertising.  However, statistics from the last recession in the 1980s point to the fact that companies that continued to spend on advertising and marketing came out of the recession stronger and ahead of their competitors when the recovery came around.  Therefore, it is important to work smarter and decide where and how to spend your hard earned marketing budgets.

Ads are everywhere

From the moment we wake up we, the consumers, are bombarded with marketing messages all day long and marketing is everywhere.  There are ads for cars, ads for beer, ads for fashion items, ads for holidays and lots of ads for all those gadgets that promise to make our life easier.  For the most part this is brand marketing and it doesn’t really register as we are concentrating on our driving our making sure we get off the bus at the right stop.  However, building brand recognition is important and when it comes to decision time we are influenced by what we have seen and heard.  However, there lies the problem.  Radio, TV and print ads can all be targeted at specific audiences, e.g.,  a  print ad for a quality Mercedes will do better in the Sunday Times Style supplement than in the local parish magazine! However, whilst it may be a targeted ad, it loses effectiveness because they are not hitting the target audience at the time when they are making a buy decision.

This is where digital internet marketing enters the equation.

All the recent reports and statistics are pointing to the fact that traditional newspapers and print magazines are losing circulation numbers and consequently advertising revenue.  For the first time in the UK, during the 3rd quarter 2009 the online spend on internet advertising surpassed that of the TV.  Today, we all have DVD players, SKY+ and TV remotes that allow us to skip past the commercials.  The rise of the IPod, MP3 players and internet and satellite radio has decreased the popularity of local and national radio stations.  The one form of advertising that is seeing tremendous year on year growth is the internet.  Used in the right way, the internet is an amazing opportunity to, not only provide highly targeted advertising and brand recognition to your target audience, but you can engage with your audience at all those crucial times in the searching, selecting and buying decision process – including right at the buy phase.

All forms of digital internet marketing are rapidly growing in popularity

As the online population continues to grow worldwide, so does the popularity of using the internet. In addition, the current economic downturn is forcing all those across the generation divide to hunt around for the best deals on products and services they can find. The internet is where these best deals are being found. Digital internet marketing offers your company an exceptional opportunity to allocate your marketing spend towards a medium that allows you to increase exposure to consumers who are actively seeking your product or service.  This is making the internet much more effective than other forms of advertising because it is targeted, effective and relevant.  It has been said many times before but this is the equivalent of McDonald’s only showing you a Big Mac commercial when you are hungry.