The CEO s Guide To Digital Marketing

Transcription

1 The CEO s Guide To Digital Marketing

2 Table Of Contents You ve Heard It All Before! 5 Return On Effort 6 Ok...But What Shoudl I Do? 8 Where Are You? 9 Where Do You Want To Be? 11 How To Get There! 12 3Sixty Interactive 111 East Court St Suite 1C Flint, MI info@3sixtyinteractive.com ONLINE MARKETING RESOURCES Thank you for taking the time to download and read this whitepaper. I hope that you find it informative and that it helps you in your efforts to market your company online. We have been providing educational resource regarding marketing and advertising in the online (digital) space for well over 10 years now. It is one of our main goals at our agency, to provide insights into online marketing and to help marketers and businesse owners cut through all of the myths that are out there. If you have a particular question that one of our resources isn t providing an answer to, please feel free to contact me and I ll be sure that you receive the answer to your question. You can reach me via at dalek@3sixtyinteractive. Drop me a note and I ll be sure to get back to you as soon as possible.

3 You ve Heard It All Before! People shop and learn in a whole new way compared to just a few years ago, so marketers need to adapt or risk extinction Brian Halligan Co author Inbound Marketing You ve heard thousands of different theories from countess account reps, ad agencies and marketing people on how to use the internet to get more business, but you re still not seeing the results that everyone is saying are possible. Now you find yourself in the position of trying to figure out why your company isn t seeing these results and what to do about it. This paper is going to review the methodology required and the opportunities that the various online marketing channels provide, or don t provide. You will gain insights on where to find your potential and current clients (no, everyone is not on Facebook), how to best communicate with them and then most importantly, how to stop guessing and start knowing what is working and what isn t working with your online marketing. Then, knowing what to do to fix what isn t working so you stop wasting valuable resources.

4 634 Million Acitive websites on the internet in 2012 Return On Effort 1.2 Trillion Google Searches We re all familiar with ROI, or the activity of quantifying the results we get from a financial effort. For online marketing we are going to explore a slight hybrid to the ROI model. We re going to look at online marketing from a ROE or Return on Effort prospective. We re adjusting to this ROE measurement because of the vast mis-understanding there is regarding the amount of time that it takes to run successful campaigns online. As with every other business activity we know that success is directly dependent upon planning, yet the vast majority of online marketing focus is at the tactical level. Unfortunately, this is not a new phenomenon. Back in the early 1990 s we couldn t get our websites launched fast enough. At the time we really didn t know what those websites should do but we were certain we had to have one. As we look at the landscape today a lot is the same. Look at how businesses are creating stampedes to get on the latest social platforms. First it was Myspace, then Facebook, then Twitter... you get the idea. We re spending amazing amounts of resources going from one tactic to another without putting a plan in place. 239 Million Internet Users In 2012 there were 634 billion active websites. Internet users in the U.S. expanded by 3.1% to 239 million. There were 1.2 trillion searches conducted on Google. These numbers tell us that more people are online than ever before! What are other businesses doing? In a study done by econsultancy found that 73% of companies had a social media budget of less than $25,000 in 2009, with 59% of companies reporting a budget increase within the next year. This study also reported that 97% of companies pay to advertise on Google AdWords, 71% pay to advertise on the Google Search Network, and 56% use the Google Content Network (keyword targeted). It was also reported that 50% of companies used Yahoo, and 44% used Bing for display advertising purposes.

5 WHERE ARE YOU? Ok... But What Shoud I Do? 1 Where You Are 2 Where You Want To Be 3 How To Get There It s time to catch your breath! Stop chasing tactics and lets start to develop an online marketing plan. Every businesse plan is wrapped in three layers: where are we now, where we want to be, and how we are going to get there. Your online marketing plan is no different. Begin by evaluating, objectively, where you are. There are essentially two categories for you to measure to gain a clear picture of where your current online marketing efforts are: traffic and conversion. Traffic Generally speaking, most conversations regarding online marketing begin with a statement of like or dislike of the companies website appearance. This may come as a shock, but if you re not getting customers to your website, it doesn t matter what it looks like! So, lets start by looking at your traffic. To accurately determine where your current traffic performance is you have to have an analytics system setup on your site. For the vast majority of businesses, Google s analytic products will be sufficient. To measure your traffic you will want to look at the following metrics in your analytics: General Traffic: Though the raw number of visitors is important, we generally recommend that you look at your traffic s trend. Is it going up? Is it going down? Or is it flat? This trending will offer valuable insights. Bounce Rates: This is the indicator of a onepage visit. Typically someone that decided you were not what they were looking for. You have to be a little careful here because you

6 want to be specifically looking at the bounce rate of your home page. A decent bounce rate for your homepage should be, on average, around 30-35%. This is an important measurement because you should be trying to get your visitors to engage with your site. If they are leaving after one page they are not engaging. Traffic Sources: Where are the visitors to your site coming from? This metric is quite possibly the single most enlightening metric that you should be evaluating. This will offer insights as to visitors that are coming from search engines, social media sites, messages, and even visitors that have come directly to your site. These insights will identify where you can invest your resources for a positive ROE. Conversions Let s start our conversation about conversions by defining what a conversion is. But before we can do that we have to think about why people are visiting your website. WHERE DO YOU WANT TO BE? Essentially, your website visitors have questions and they are on your site looking for those answers. What questions do your prospective customers usually have? Conversions: This is the primary purpose of online marketing, getting your customers and prospective customers to take action. Unfortunately, this is also the most ignored measurement. A conversion is measured by the users activity. However, because we tend to value only those end of buy-cycle decisions we may not be evaluating all conversions. As an example, the downloading of a case study by a prospective customer should be considered a conversion. Now that you ve taken some time to evaluate where you are, it is time to identify where you want to be. Generally speaking, the measurements that you use to identify where you want to be will be the same measurements that you use to identify where you are, traffic and conversions. Coming to a decision on where you want to be regarding these measurements is very similar to any business goal setting exercise; benchmark where you are, take a look at your competition and then throw in a does of reality. These will become the goals for your online marketing effort and will drive every online marketing activity. This will begin establishing the framework for your Return on Effort analysis, making sure that you are maximizing the value of every activity, for your company. As with all goal setting, your online marketing goals should touch all your business measurements. Here are some basic yet effective goals that every business can use to improve their online marketing ROE. Sales: This is at the heart of every business regardless of your industry or customer. You don t have to be selling widgets online to have a positive impact on your sales. As an example, if your company is a service-based business, generating more leads will have a positive impact on your sales. Conversations: Start to have conversations with your customers and prospective customers. Successful realizations of this goal will have a positive ROE by first increasing your customer retention, and secondly by increasing customer engagement.

7 Value Added: Your online audience is accustomed to having special perks with the companies that they engage with. Sometimes this is presented in cost savings, but often it is realized in a special relationship, the ability to make suggestions, or to gain special knowledge that helps them. Channel Selection These are just a coupe examples of the types of online goals that may have a positive impact on your business. Remember that the key to increasing your business is to look at your company, products and/or services through the yes of your customer. HOW TO GET THERE! Everything that we have been discussing to this point has been in preparation of this final stage, creating an online marketing strategy. A good strategy will guide you in making the right decisions on what activities to execute to bring the results that are important to your company. In creating this strategic plan it is important to remember that this is a channel strategy and needs to be created with the recognition that a mix of online channels will be required to successfully attain any of your online marketing goals. Contrary to popular belief, social media or search or alone will not bring your company online success. In fact, if you were to focus your online activity to only one of the online channels your ROE would be so disastrous that you would be well advised to do nothing instead. The channel selection for your online marketing efforts are going to be dictated by two elements; who your customer is and what your goal is. As an example, if your customer is the CEO of an enterprise sized company and your goal is to get a meeting with this person, organic search optimization probably won t be the best channel for such an immediate goal. In selecting your channel it is important to recognize how your customers will engage with you based on where they are at within the buy cycle. In the earliest stage of the buying cycle the customer is searching for solutions to their problem. They are researching products, services and companies trying to get answers on how to fix their specific problem. The channels that are going to work best for attracting these customers will be: Search engines Social platforms Blogs For customers that are now past the research stage and are now in the decision stage, recognizing that they have now narrowed you down to their one, two, or three finalists and they want details: Your Website Blogs Social networks

8 About 3Sixty Interative 3Sixty Interactive is a digital marketing agency with over ten years of experience working with clients of all sizes to deliver the business goals that they have been in search of. We offer a variety of digital marketing solutions that include search engine optimization, digital advertising, marketing, social media, customized strategy reports, analytics and maintenance of your marketing plan. Learn more about 3Sixty Interactive at or by calling us at Sixty.