After you have decided to launch the Internet aspect to your marketing campaign, your next step is to determine where it should start. As you begin to design your campaign, you need to identify your audience and their impressions about your business. The most important things to consider when designing an Internet marketing campaign are to decipher who your current and potential customers are, your reputation with them, and their feelings about your brand, product or service.
Some other vital information to consider as you begin your design are your competitor’s presence and tactics, as well as the reputation they have created among your targeted audience. On a technical note, you will also want to consider your website’s search engine optimization, keywords, and other factors that help ease your current patrons’ search for your products and services.
As you look to tailor your campaign to your new potential customers, you should consider your current customers as a guideline for the demographic make-up. Since you can get some demographic data from your current client base, they will give you a good idea of who you should be targeting for new business. One important thing to note here: your efforts to attract new business should not alienate your current business. An example of a poor choice in this regard is the use of tremendous incentives by the major cell phone service providers to attract new customers to their service, while not offering similar incentives to their existing customers. The key here is to engage your current customer base in such a way that they actually help you promote your marketing efforts to their network of contacts, both online and in person.
The perception of your brand is something that can direct your campaign’s focal points. If you have an outstanding reputation already, you can enhance and share it with new people through your online campaign. On the other hand, a lackluster reputation will require focusing more on repairing relationships with those that have a negative opinion of you before you can expect to turn new contacts into patrons.
As far as your competitors are concerned, a thorough examination of their presence on the Internet, as well as traditional media, will give you an opportunity to see what avenues they have chosen to use and an idea of where you should focus your efforts. Your focus should be to have a respectable presence everywhere that your core competitors have chosen to be, but you should really take advantage of becoming dominant in the media that they have ignored, provided that they are viable avenues for your business.
If you have not secured a domain and constructed a website for your business, this should be the very first thing you address in your Internet marketing campaign. Unless you have a tremendous technical aptitude and strong web design skills, you should probably hire someone else to do the design of the site, rather than attempting such a large undertaking yourself. Some things to consider when discussing the design of your website with a potential designer:
- Ease of use for visitors to the site
- Functionality for its purpose
- Ease of search for potential visitors (more technically, the “SEO” and keywords)
If you already have a website, it may behoove you to revisit these three items and re-engineer the site to optimize it. Regardless of whether you are designing your web presence or re-vamping it to meet your new needs, you should strongly consider the addition of a weblog as an aspect of it. This provides you with an opportunity to connect with your current and potential customers and provide them with the most up-to-date information about your business without having to alter your primary website.
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