With so many products and services bought and sold online, it’s crucial to form an Internet marketing strategy if you hope to put a dent in your online market. In order to formulate an Internet marketing strategy, you need a deep understanding of the following.
- The Product or Service: In order to market any product or service online or off, you need to help your customers see that their lives will vastly improve by incorporating the product or service in their lives. This can only come from study and/or personal use of the product or service in question.
- Your Target Audience: What online prospects and customers will you be targeting with your Internet marketing strategy? You need to study your target market’s motivations, their fears and apprehensions and the various ways your product or service will improve their lives. This also requires deep study.
- Online Marketing Practices: In order to formulate an Internet marketing strategy, you need to understand current online consumer habits, search engine practices (SEO) and you need to keep up-to-breast of the current online marketing practices being used by the top marketers to gain top rankings.
If you hope to formulate an Internet marketing strategy that holds up for years to come and that produces the results you want, you must take time to conduct the above research. Use current online tools to help you gather the data you need. Read online forums, ask questions on those forums, use social media and participate in the conversations. While you’re doing this, study the current online marketing strategies currently making waves and study your product or service until you are intimately familiar with it. Now you’re ready to start forming your strategy.
Set Easy-to-Reach Goals – Your Road Map to Success
Before you start with a strategy, start coming up with some goals you hope to accomplish in the near and eventual future. These might include:
- Achieve a certain amount of traffic or sales per month
- Create a certain amount of content
- Receive a certain number of subscribers/blog comments
When you set easy-to-reach goals, you will be more likely to stick to your Internet marketing strategy when you feel like you are accomplishing something. This is important if you ever face adversity, which you are bound to do.
Many marketers fail to formulate an Internet marketing strategy. They just start with the latest technique they recently read about online. It’s only when this technique doesn’t bring immediate results that they start looking for the next ‘best’ technique. This almost always ends up disaster, as jumping from one technique to another rarely ever works. Instead, always remember that online marketing is about consistency. Pick one technique, one path to success if you will, and you’ll be more likely to stick with your Internet marketing strategy.
Consider your goals and the techniques you will use to achieve those goals your roadmap to success. Whenever you feel like quitting or whenever you feel like things aren’t happening fast enough, just look back to your goal sheet or road map and remind yourself that you’ve formulated an Internet marketing strategy that is designed to get results. Have patience and you will experience those results if you keep to your plan.
Techniques to Achieve Your Goals
There are many forms of Internet marketing that you can incorporate into your strategy. The most basic include a website, a subscriber list, a social media presence and video marketing. While that sounds like a basic plan, it’s only when you start to put the plan into action that you begin to realize how complex each of those marketing techniques truly are.
Setting up a website is no small feat and neither is putting together a convincing online marketing video. This is why you need daily/weekly and monthly processes so that you can build your Internet marketing strategy slowly over time. This is how you build a business that isn’t easily toppled by the opposition and one that is more likely to last for years to come.
Daily/Weekly/Monthly Processes
When you formulate an Internet marketing strategy, along with goals, you need to come up with some benchmarks that you hope to accomplish in the near future. These might include:
- Set up website in one week
- Write content for website in one week
- Get website up and running in one month
When you know what you have to accomplish, actually completing those tasks becomes easy when you set time aside each day, week or month. Prioritize your list and separate your goals and tasks into daily, weekly and monthly processes. Put these into a spreadsheet or some type of form so that you can refer to it and keep track of your progress at all times.
If you target each task on your list, before you know it your Internet marketing strategy will be in full-force, attracting prospects and selling products and services.
Resist Temptation to Stray
You must resist the temptation to deviate from your goals and task-list. Again, think of it as your road map to success. Even if you come across the latest, greatest online marketing technique, you must pledge yourself to continue with the plan you’ve formulated. That’s how you get to the top.
With consistency, a solid plan of action and the drive to make it all work, you can formulate an Internet marketing strategy that gets true results. It’s not going to be easy and there will be tons of obstacles in your way, but remain strong, refer back to your map often and you’ll soon be out of the woods and into the clear where all the money happens to be.
