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Posts Tagged ‘businesses’

It sounds like a silly concept, doesn’t it? I mean, it’s your business, so you know your own products or services inside out, right? It’s amazing how many
businesses get caught up in the design process of their Internet presence and
lose sight of what it is that they are actually promoting online. Quite often,businesses get so involved in wondering how their Web site looks that they actually forget about what it is they are promoting, whom they are targeting,and why they are even promoting it online in the first place.

Can you see how the key components of the foundation work together? So, what are you promoting? Is it simply your products/services? Yes, this is what you want your customers to purchase, but selling to someone online is a lot different from selling to someone face to face. There are so many factors
that play an influential role in encouraging an online user to take the next step and engage your business and its offerings.

Each of these factors typically tie into your most fundamental (and often overlooked) online objectives.To illustrate, let’s assume that you are promoting Product X, which is a highly specialized piece of equipment with a hefty price tag. You are not the only competitor in the market that offers Product X, but your version of the product is slightly different from the rest. So why should someone buy your product? This is where you have to wrap your head around what you are promoting, while differentiating it from the other options that users have within the marketplace.

To illustrate the importance of defining precise online objectives, consider the following. Throughout the years many businesses have made Web site traffic their primary objective and have invested heavily into various means of getting traffic to their Web sites. These businesses followed the philosophy that traffic would result in increased sales. Well, how can you judge the success of your online activities if your whole campaign is based on a vague objective? Simply generating traffic is not tied to a financial objective of any sort, so how can one judge the success of the campaign with such a loose goal
in mind? Instead, stating an objective like “achieving a cost per customer acquisition of $15 as a result of a targeted PPC advertising campaign” helps a business to put a targeted, measurable objective on a particular activity.

Without defining precise objectives for your online activities, it is nearly impossible to gauge success of any sort. Using the example above, you coulddrive waves of traffic to your Web site, but what if the medium you selected wasn’t right for your business and the traffic you received was not a targeted visitor at all? You received lots of traffic, yes, but you also wasted time and money and had a poor ROI as a result. This often forces businesses to make subjective decisions about the success of the campaign or the effectiveness of the medium in general, but the truth of the matter is that it’s not fair to state whether something is a failure or success unless you can really prove it. By defining objectives that are measurable, businesses can determine if a campaign works or doesn’t work. If it works, you can continue to implement such campaigns, and if it doesn’t work, you can tweak your approach and test it again. The key lesson here is to make all of your objectives measurable.

Understanding what you are trying to achieve online plays a critical role in the planning process for your Web site and your overall online marketing strategy. It seems like a simple concept, doesn’t it? I mean, why would you build a Web site if you didn’t understand what you want it to do? Well, the problem is that even in this day and age, many businesses are developing their online presence simply because it’s just one of those things that businesses need to do. These businesses build Web sites that are online brochures for their business with little or no thought about their customers or what they want their site to achieve.

Any online marketing activities, whether it is the development of your Web site or planning sessions for an online campaign, should begin by documenting the specific primary objectives for the activity. Typically it boils down to one primary objective that is common across any business—revenue generation. But what does this really mean? Do you have to sell products online to generate revenue for your business, or can you simply use the site to qualify sales leads for your internal sales department? Overall there are many different online marketing objectives for a company Web site or a specific campaign. People tend to label their objectives simply as “revenue generation” as opposed to breaking down the objective into more specific terms. Below is a list of common online marketing objectives:

• Generate increased brand awareness
• Generate and qualify leads for the internal sales department
• Increase revenue as a result of online sales
• Provide increased customer service by providing the Web user with more   self-service tools and information
• Increase customer retention
• Decrease internal costs by streamlining the share of information online.