Planning Your Internet Marketing

My experience in counseling internet marketers is that they either have a highly technical background (or know someone who does) or are marketing and sales people with limited technical background. Of course there are many in between. One common denominator among them is the lack of planning the website or blog and answering the basic question of what do you want the thing to do? This leads to the second question that is most important, does it do it?

Most answer the first question with, "I want to sell the stuff that is on my website". Obvious answer. Everybody does, all 400 million websites want to sell you something or tell you something. Does that message really come across on your website? The purpose must be obvious or self evident to the user in the first few seconds of the visit.

If you have accomplished that, then you must design the navigation and the purchase process toward a fictional user that has limited ability to think and minimal time to pick and buy. If you think you have succeeded here you must test it. Do not become your own judge and jury. I see people who come in and can show how easy it is to use the website or explain what the website does. When I try to do something it does not work or requires special knowledge to make it work. If I were a user, I would be gone. It is the forest and tree thing. Test it with your friends, family, business associates and listen to what they say. Take the approach that your first pass at your website is not very good, but let others tell you why. Let them click around. Let them even buy something. Listen, listen and listen some more. Watch them go through your process, watch what they struggle with or when they get exasperated. What seems clear and simple to you is probably not that way to many others.

So take some time an jot down what you want your website to do, how you propose to do it and what it might look like. Even consider an outline or flow chart and write some copy you might include. Starting like this will increase the probablity of having a site the does what you want it do to.

Internet Marketing is Marketing

Many of my SCORE clients ask me "how do I market on the Internet" or "I have a web site but I get no hits". It seems that many of them are looking for the "Internet" to be the "marketing magic wand" that drives business to them in some kind of magical manner.

When I get into this discussion it usually comes down to a weakness in the overall marketing strategy, not to the failure of their web site or the lack of "Internet marketing"

My advice is that "Internet marketing" is only one of the tools that can be used in an effective marketing strategy. therefore one should have a knowledge of how the "Internet' fits into the overall objectives of the marketing plan.

Marketing is the bow; you have a quiver full of arrows and Internet marketing is one of the arrows along with direct mail, media advertising, cold calling, etc. that one might use to reach the targeted customer. Your marketing plan may use one or more of the arrows depending on who is the targeted audience and were are they.

So the questions that you need to answer are:

• Who is my targeted audience?
• Where are they?
• What are they buying now?
• Why should they buy my product or service instead of what they are buying now?

If you can answer these questions you are in great shape to design a marketing strategy to reach your audience and be able to formulate an effective Internet strategy as well.