Strategic Internet Marketing

The Internet is the perfect medium for planning and implementing an effective process for measuring your marketing efforts Return on Investment(ROI). Strategic Internet Marketing is about designing a selling process into your Internet presence that can track and measure your marketing campaigns results. The effect is higher quality leads from the Internet to your Sales department and being able to accurately measure the ROI. Underdog SEO Services will work with your sales and marketing team, and even your customers or partners to develop a strategy that sells your business. A marketing strategy specifies a target market and a related marketing plan. The marketing strategy is the big picture of what a company will do in a market. There are two components to the marketing strategy;Target Market: The target market is mostly a homogenous group of customers to whom a company wishes to appeal.Marketing Mix: Variables under the companies control designed to satisfy the target market.The importance of targeting customers in this process cannot be understated. The target market is surrounded by the marketing mix. The Internet is only one medium that is used in this process. A typical Marketing Mix includes an amount of product, offered at a price, along with some form of promotion to tell customers about the product.These basic marketing concepts must be taken into account when planning any Internet Marketing Strategy. As a fairly new advertising and distribution channel, the web hold tremendous promise. The Internet is slowly replacing traditional media as the primary provider of news and information. The web is also opening new markets and allowing companies to communicate more effectively with their customers.Before you venture into the Internet Marketplace with your product or service, you must ask yourself these basic questions;Should you take your brand online?This depends on what percentage of your consumers shop online. If 50% of your target market is online, this does not necessarily mean that you should spend 50% of your advertising budget online. It depends how much time your target market spends online. There may be more cost effective ways to reach the same group. What is the nature of your product or service?Products that require personal inspection or testing are much harder to sell online.What approach is most appropriate?Should you open an online storefront or be part of an online mall? Maybe you should limit the use of the internet to just advertising and not online purchasing. Maybe you only need an online catalog your consumers can browse through. Expensive products that require a lot of information searching will benefit from and information loaded website. Those marketing packaged goods may only need to invest in web advertising.Is your business purely an online one?For example, Amazon.com has no stores, only fulfillment warehouses. Barnes and Noble have stores as well as an online internet presence.Does your product have a global market?If your target market is global, then you will want to use the Internet to reach overseas customers. Translation issues, foreign regulations, copyright and tax laws and foreign currency exchanges must be addressed.What is the level of competition online?Some markets are going to be more competitive than others. Determine if your budget is going to allow you to run with the competition, or leave you at the bottom of the first 1000.Synchronize your efforts.Ensure your Internet Marketing Plan is in sync with the rest of your traditional marketing plan.How much resource are you going to dedicate to an online marketing campaign? Many companies have made the mistake of offering a feature on their website, and then not fully supporting it. For example, if you have a live support helpdesk to provide instant support, then you better make sure the staff manning it will be able to answer all questions related to the product or service they are supporting.The answers to questions such as these will provide the marketer with a good understanding of whether or not online marketing is a viable option for their company. Proper research will also help identify the risk factors.Remember, a marketer’s job does not end with planning. A good plan by itself does not guarantee success. The plan must be carried out and implemented effectively.