Recently I was talking with a very bright traditional marketer on the value of integrating Internet marketing into a websites marketing mix. Personally, I have witnessed significant website sales or lead increases when traditional marketing strategies like direct mail, radio, television or publicity are performed in conjunction with proven internet marketing strategies. Although my marketing friend did not disagree with the concept, he re-focused the discussion on the importance of establishing a marketing message and objective even BEFORE contemplating ANY marketing strategies. What an excellent point! What about you Have you created a clear and concise marketing message? Have you defined your customer benefits? Have you established a measurable objective? If not pause your campaigns and come with me Your Marketing Objective Defines Your Strategies Business owners and marketers have a tendency to think in broad terms about their marketing objective by focusing on ones such as generating traffic or designing a website. Instead, the effectiveness of their internet marketing strategies should be driven by specific marketing objectives established from the end result required of the business to be economically sustainable. For example, generating traffic is not directly tied to a financial objective like generating a cost per sale of $75. The common misperception of traffic equals sales has wasted tremendous amounts of dollars on advertising that delivers poor quality traffic. Unfortunately, because of a lack of an objective, some businesses develop negative attitudes towards Internet marketing by falsely associating poor results to their performance versus poor results to their lack of an objective. Recently a new client described his horror story of spending a significant part of his budget on contracting with a paid search service provider. The resulting paid search campaign was a major failure in terms of satisfying his managements net profit objective. Actually, the result of the outsourcing caused this client a massive negative net profit. After asking further questions to understand why the situation occurred, I discovered that the blame could not be attributed to the service providers failure to perform but instead to the clients failure to clearly define their marketing objective. The client contracted with the service provider to generate traffic which they did. However, the client wanted to generate sales that achieved a positive net profit. If the client would have defined this objective immediately, they would have sought a different service provider one that focuses on performance. You see, a goal of generating a positive net profit involves a more strategic performance-centered setup and management of a paid search campaign which this particular service provider was not capable of delivering through their business model. Unfortunately the service provider delivered massive volumes of paid search traffic which failed to produce sales. After hearing the horrific story and the severe money lost in the experience, we clearly defined the clients objective and quickly generated a positive net profit the next month by focusing on building landing pages that converted the paid search traffic. Your Marketing Objective is the Balance between Success and Failure. By defining a clear and measurable objective, you can decide whether an internet marketing strategy should be increased or decreased. From this perspective, a simple yes/no decision is made as to the success of a particular strategy: Yes it achieved the marketing objective and should be maximized; or No it fell short of achieving the marketing objective and should be dropped or adjusted and tested again. Without a measurable objective, the success or failure of an internet marketing strategy can only be assumed using basic subjective means. You need real data compared against an objective to build world-class virtual business. Create a Clear and Concise Marketing Message Your marketing message is essential for generating performance from your Internet marketing strategy. Rather on your website, landing page, or paid search ad, the message attracts visitor attention, qualifies the type of visitor and persuades the visitor to complete your defined objective. An excellent book written by Doug Hall titled, Jump Start Your Business Brain outlines three essential components of an effective marketing message: 1. Overt Benefit: answers the customer-centric question of whats in it for me? 2. Reason to Believe: what persuasive credibility shows that you will do as you promise? 3. Dramatic Difference: what is your uniqueness to the customer? The rudimentary knowledge gained from these three components is that you must focus on your visitor and answer their buying questions. By satisfying your visitors needs in a manner that persuades them to buy, they will correspondingly satisfy your needs. Are You Satisfying Your Visitors Needs? An easy way to assess whether your marketing message is even capable of satisfying your visitors needs is to count the number of times your website copy states you or yours versus we and us. Although primitive, this exercise will immediately tune you in to where your marketing message is directed. If youre talking more about we then about you then youre focusing on the wrong message. Instead of spending more time on developing a traffic generation strategy, re-focus your time and thinking on developing an effective marketing message with a measurable objective. Ultimately your traffic generation strategy will achieve higher returns and stronger results when you attract the most qualified visitors through an effective marketing message and gain data-driven insight from a measurable objective. |
