Internet marketing in 2011: 4 Things you can do Right now to be Prepared

It is now time of year that most people are planning on what we didn’t do in 2010 and what we should carry out for 2011. Even expert internet marketers have a long ‘to do’ list of points to enhance their online marketing performance – made up of tasks to expressly increase ROI or something like that to save lots of time as well as raise efficiency. For those of you that are doing your own online marketing, this sort of tasks may be way down on your list, way below items more specifically related to your business. These are the types of tasks that may not be ‘sexy’ and fun, which is why they are easily ‘put on the long finger’ (as they say in Ireland), but are critical to bring the best results from your online marketing activities.

This is the time to build your online marketing ready for further achievement in 2011 and here are 4 things you actually have to do this month – or first thing in January, if this is a lively month within your business.

1. Finish your Online Advertising and marketing Strategy

You could think you’ve got a plan, maybe it’s in your mind and you haven’t had time for you to place it down theoretically, but to obtain the utmost success from your online marketing efforts you’ll need a proper online marketing plan. Be realistic and be flexible, but not so much so that you let it slip.

• Identify your Target audience – See my article “Get Focused for a More Effective Marketing Campaign” which provides specific steps to do this and a sample format.
• Determine your Goals – Be specific. You don’t just want ‘more sales’; set a specific target and identify what kind of sales you want – from which revenue streams, from which of your sales efforts, etc.
• Outline your Resources – Staff (in-house and out sourced), other colleagues (suppliers, network buddies), social media connections, other ‘experts’ that may help you out; as well as hardware, software and any online applications you are using.
• Set out your Day to Day and 12 Month Plans – See this article “Timing is EVERYTHING in Online Marketing” for specific tips and a sample format.
• Establish an Online Marketing Policy – If you do have other people working with you it is important that you have agreed an online marketing policy to ensure that:
  • The content on your site, social media channels and all other online marketing efforts has a consistent voice
  • You have a plan for dealing with good and bad feedback (reviews, complaints, bad comments, etc.)
  • You are best utilising your resources in your Day to Day and 12 Month Plans
• Establish an Internet & Social Media Usage Policy – Ensure that members of your staff are not doing anything online that may offend or bring legal troubles to you or your business, as well as ensure best use of time for specific job related activities online and any personal time you may allow.

See presentation 7 Steps to Business Success with Social Media Marketing for things to consider when setting up your Online Marketing Plan.

2. Make your Website fit

1.Redevelop Your website Using a Good Cms – Whether you utilize WordPress, Joomla, another free application or a bespoke CMS out of your web developer; make sure the system provides you with the ability to:

• Fully add/edit/manage main pages of the site, as well as daily/weekly things like news, special offers, upcoming events etc. (whether you call that the blog or not) to help you have up to date, relevant content.
• Set unique Titles and Descriptions for every page/post of your website, that is critical for SEO, as well as for feeding your website into Social Media channels.
• Generate an Feed so that visitors can subscribe for updates using a feed reader or email.
• Integrate together with your Social Media Channels – Facebook ‘Like’ buttons, Tweet This, ShareIt, etc., in addition to widgets showing your stream in your networks.
• Ping engines like google – posts correctly setup on WordPress sites could possibly get into Google during first minutes.
• Automatically create updated xml and html sitemaps.
• Post via email and mobile phones for more flexibility.
• Be sure you get properly been trained in using the CMS to help you make best utilization of all these features.

2.Ensure that your site is ‘speaking to’ your Target audience

• Is the content in your site relevant to them and addressing their demands?
• Would the style be appealing to them?
• Are you currently using the ‘language’ they are applying? Targeted Keyphrase Studies not only good for SEO, it’s an excellent marketing exercise, suggesting what people are looking for in their own individual language.
• Do you need to segment your website according to different segments of the target market? On the site Used to do for the Kinsale Chamber of Tourism we did a weddings mini-site on the subdomain and are just completing mini-sites for Conferences and Golf. WordPress networked sites are fantastic for this as you can easily create new sites from the same installation and share posts, templates, etc.
• Must you Geo-Target your site? Show different versions to individuals from different locations or using different languages?
• Do your targets primarily view your website and interact online along with you via desktop or cellular devices? Is your site fully functional and attractive via cell phones, iPads, etc.

3.Make your internet site more Search Engine Friendly In case you haven’t currently, do some studying on SEO (using respected sources, please) and ensure:

• Your site is crawl-able – to ensure that search engines access your articles and follow the navigation to any or all the pages on your site.
• You’re using key phrases out of all important areas.
• Your download speeds are as quickly as possible – optimize images, limit calls to external files, while keeping the primary file small, etc.
• Google Webmaster Tools is a good resource for checking these areas.

3. Setup Google Analytics (or another of your liking with similar features)

1. Set ‘Desired goals’ to reflect the goals you’ve occur your Online Marketing Plan to be able to clearly see how you’re progressing and what regions of your site are working for you personally and NOT working for you.
2. For those who have an E-Commerce site integrate it to be able to see your actual ROI for online activities. If you don’t come with an E-commerce site then set values for your goals to give you a concept of your ROI.
3. Create Custom Reports to obviously see your results out of your specific online marketing activities (i.e. shopping cart software, PPC ads, social networking channels, etc.) to be able to see how well each does for you.
4. Make sure you have enough time each week on your Daily plan to review your analytics and can compare to your goals and adjust your web Marketing Plan as needed.

4. Arrange your computer data

Whether you use an expert CRM (possibly Internet marketing specific) application or a wide open source spreadsheet, be sure you can easily look at and utilise all your data in one place:

1. Information – Customers, prospects, suppliers along with other important people (influencers inside your industry, media, etc.) such as the social media channels they’re on.
2. Customer and Prospect Inter-Activity – Proposals, sales, enquiries, site visits along with other interactions online and off.
3. Campaigns – PPC, Social networking, Email Marketing, Offline Marketing – who had been targeted, who responded?
4. Referrals – Who’s giving you good and never so good referrals? Who are able to you give good referrals to – a terrific way to build relationships?
5. Upselling and cross selling opportunities
6. Results – Are you able to easily see where profits come from? Website, PPC an internet-based marketing statistics ought to be integrated here together with information gathered offline.
7. Costs – Just how much did it cost you to create a sale? Which products/services bring the greatest/least ROI?
8. Project/Time Management – Just how much time are you shelling out for a sale or project? Have you been using your time efficiently?
9. Team Management – Have you been using all of your staff efficiently? When associates are bringing in the greatest results?
10. Email Marketing Mailing List – Either run out of your CRM or integrated having a third party provider.

So you now know what I will be doing between Christmas and New Year. One big task I tackled this year was getting my website where I’d like it to be, using WordPress like a CMS and fully integrating my social networking channels, but I’ve the more analytical tasks still to operate on. I’ve written internet marketing plans for lots of clients in the past month or two, but mine isn’t quite complete. My Google Analytics and SugarCRM require more customisation and data included to become more effective for me.

It really is hard to find time for this stuff when you are so busy within the day to day activities of your business, regardless if you are an online marketing professional or otherwise. So it’s important to find the time now and hang up systems that’ll be easy to maintain throughout every season.

Are you experiencing any tips about how to boost your Online Marketing effects or strategies for apps to best execute these activities? Please add your comments here.

Related posts:

1. Get Well targeted to More effective Internet marketing Campaign

Tags : 2011, Google Analytics, marketing, online, plan, SEO, social media, Twitter

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