Objectives: The web marketing process (part 2)

This article is part 2 of a series. You'll find part one here.

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The key to success in web marketing is the objectives you set. As the saying goes, if you set out to achieve nothing, you'll probably succeed. I'm the sort of person who considers such sentiments to be nice in a theoretical way, but of little practical use. Especially when I'm busy.

Fortunately, in the web marketing process there are concrete benefits to be had from your objectives. The main benefit is that you'll make more money. Here's why...

• You know exactly how many visitors you need to get to your site to reach your profit target
  
• You know how much money you can invest to reach your profit target
  
• If the amount you can invest won't deliver your target, you don't spend
• If the amount you can invest delivers more than your target, you can reduce the investment (e.g. if it's needed for other things)
  
• As your ratios improve (over time) you'll develop the ability to determine, in advance, whether or not any given paid advertising is likely to return a profit
• You find out where you need to promote to best reach your target audience (get more from every dollar you invest)
  

I suppose a cynical person may feel it all sounds too good to be true. Let's get started, then you can see for yourself that setting objectives within the web marketing process is both useful and practical.

Your Campaign Budget:

First things first – how much money are you prepared to invest in your next marketing campaign?

If you're brand new to marketing, you may not be sure what you're willing to invest. In some ways, it doesn't really matter for your first campaign, as long as you can afford to lose the money.

The plain fact is, when a person starts out in web marketing, there's a good chance the campaign will make a loss. Consider any such loss to be an investment in your web marketing education.

For now, it's far more important that you pick an amount you can afford. Don't waste time trying to figure out what the 'correct' amount to invest might be.

Your Desired ROI (return on investment):

I take the view that marketing campaigns are investments. I expect them to deliver a return, and I like to set a specific target ROI. Here's how that looks using example data...

Campign budget: £1,000
Desired ROI: 10%
Target revenue: £1,100

As you can see, in this example I'm aiming to turn £1,000 into £1,100. Most of my campaigns run for 30 days, so that's 10% per month – a lot better than the return offered by my bank.

Average Income per Sale:

The average income per sale is the amount of money you expect to earn, on average, from each product sold during the campaign.

If possible, use your company's net profit on the product being sold. This net profit figure should exclude the cost of the campaign itself. Why? Because that's already covered by the campaign budget.

Let's Recap:

• You have a budget of X dollars
• You're looking to generate a return on that budget of Y percent
• You expect to earn Z dollars per sale

With these 3 figures, you can work out everything you need to know about your campaign. In particular, you can find out how many visitors you need to visit your web site to achieve the target ROI.

Sound good? In the next instalment, we'll take a look at how to do just that.

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The Web Marketing Process (part 1)

This is part 1 of a series of articles. Get live updates as each new part is released: Follow on Twitter.

The Web Marketing Process contains 5 steps, each working together to deliver ever more profitable campaigns. The 5 steps are..

1. Objectives
2. Visitors
3. Leads
4. Follow up
5. Report

The web marketing process is a virtuous circle. Each step contributes something essential to the one that follows.

The 5th step contributes crucial information that feeds back into step one of the next campaign.

The web marketing process is the key to success that drives all wildly successful online marketing campaigns. And it's the best way for you to build an enormous competitive advantage. Let's take a look at each step now...

Step One: Objectives

In step one, you state your desired return on investment (i.e. profit). You then work backwards to determine how many visitors you have to send to your site to achieve your target. I'll explain how to do this in a future blog entry.

You also define your target market(s) in step one. This information is essential to the success of step two (and the rest of the campaign).

Practical target marketing also pays off in step three, and is the subject of a future article in this blog.

Step Two: Visitors

Getting visitors to your site is essential to your web marketing success. The questions you'll need to answer are...

• What sort of visitors do you want?
• Where do they hang out on the Internet?
• Where do they hang out offline?
  
• What's the best source of visitors for this specific campaign?
• How much money do you have to play with?
• What can you do if you don't have enough money?

This is where proper target marketing really pays off. As you can see, there's a lot to getting visitors to your site. I'll look at a number of different ways to get targeted visitors to your site, including SEO marketing, in a series of future blog articles.

Step Three: Leads

Getting visitors to your site is essential, but it's not an end unto itself. The web marketing process is about making money. To do that, you have to convert visitors into leads.

Put another way, step three is about lead generation. The key components in lead generation are...

• Landing page
• The offer
• Copywriting
• Conversion

There's a lot more to lead conversion than meets the eye. Once again, I'll take a specific look at the tips, tricks and techniques of lead generation in a future article.

Step Four: Follow up

Now that you have leads, it's time to work on the sale. This involves follow up. For most businesses, a systematised customer relationship management (CRM) system is worth its weight in gold.

Naturally, it all works far better if you're following a plan that started way back when you first defined your target market. What's more, your offer and call-to-action (conversion) in step three ought to be integrated with and support your follow-up process.

The end result of the follow up process must be either a 'yes' (i.e. a sale) or a 'no' (i.e. no sale). You can't progress to the final step until you've forced each prospect to make a decision.

Step Five: Reporting

The web marketing process doesn't end with the sale. This is a virtuous circle. The fifth step is designed to provide essential information for step one of your next campaign.

In particular, you're going to want to know whether or not you achieved the profit and visitor targets you set in step one. In addition, you'll need to look at the following...

• The results of any split testing (e.g. an A/B test on your offer, or copy, or call-to-action)
• The actual ratios achieved in steps 2 and 3 versus the ones you used in step one
• Anything else you were testing (e.g. different visitor sources)

This data is then fed back into step one, and used in the next campaign. Over time, your ratios become incredibly accurate. It becomes possible to predict, accurately and in advance, whether any given advertising is likely to deliver your profit target. This alone is an enormous competitive advantage, and will save you thousands of dollars.

That's the power of the web marketing process. You'll find specific and detailed information about each of 5 steps in an upcoming series of articles. They're to be published right here in this blog, and the first is due out soon.

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68 Lead Generation, Social Media Marketing, SEO, Copy Writing and Web Marketing Articles

This article marketing page contains 68 original articles (by me) about Internet marketing, copywriting, lead generation, search engine optimization and social media marketing.

Here's a sample of the topics on offer...

• Is there SEO value in Social Bookmarking?
• How to charge more for your product or service
• How to overcome human inertia in lead generation
• Get more sales from ad copy
• Press Release tips
• Online marketing with social media
• Lead generation's deadly sins
• The power of 'you' in online advertising

Click through, have a look around, and bookmark the page.

How to get in-depth attitudinal information about your target market totally free of charge

Target marketing is the critical success factor in any promotion. Your ability to get attitudinal information about your desired audience greatly improves your odds of running a successful campaign.

It's now possible to get hold of such information free of charge. What's more, you can go as deep as you like (the deeper you go, the more powerful your promotion will be).

This article explains how to get attitudinal market research data on your desired audience.

The life-blood of SEO, Internet and social media marketing

Leads are the life-blood of every business. Without leads there can be no sales.

Lead generation is the process of deliberately setting out to find people who are interested in your product or service, and ready to say 'yes' to one of the following...

• More information
  
• A phone call from you to them
• An appointment with you

That's lead generation. So what's is Internet lead generation?

Internet lead generation uses the web to find people ready to say 'yes'. It also takes advantage of the nature of the web to improve the overall lead generation process. The main way it achieves this is through automation. In particular, a web site can...

• Ask questions and make decisions based on the answer
• Link to external content where required
• Provide additional content to support lead conversion (e.g. video testimonials)
• Track and measure absolutely everything - automatically
• Produce real-time reports on demand
• Send visitors to your landing page (in many ways the Internet is your list - see this Twitter page for an example)
• Follow up leads automatically
• Respond in real time (e.g. instant fulfilment of digital products and services)
• Integrate with traditional offline lead generation activity

If you're starting to get the feeling the web offers you lead generation on steroids, you're absolutely right.

The Internet offers lead generators so much more than we ever had before. Direct marketing has never been as powerful as it is now. If you're not using the full array of Internet marketing and social media tools to promote your business, you're missing out.

Twitter owns Internet marketing - here's how to get your slice of the pie...

There's no doubt about it - Twitter is an excellent way to generate leads. My own testing has found that a single Tweet is good for an average of 3 visitors per 100 followers (varies with content, time of day, day of week). That's an interesting statistic, isn't it?

What it tells me is I need to get as many people following me on Twitter as I can. The question is, do I want quantity over quality? If I pick up 1,000 highly targeted and responsive followers, am I better off than somebody with 10,000 followers of assorted quality and responsiveness?

I think I am, which is why I don't automatically follow people who start following me. This costs me followers, and slows down the speed at which I pick up new ones. It's very much a 'slow and steady wins the race' approach to Twitter - and I'm satisfied it's working for me.

My Twitter page has one objective - to be the Internet's best index of links to information, tools, video, resources and news on these topics...

• Internet marketing
• Lead generation
• SEO (search engine optimisation)
• SEM (search engine marketing)
• Ad copy writing
• Web promotion
• Article marketing
  
• Market research
• Social media marketing
• Social media optimisation

I post a new Tweet every 50 minutes (often even more frequently), 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Follow my Twitter page, and you'll have access to the best of this material from right across the web. It's an excellent way to find this stuff.

Do you want to get your piece of Twitter's Internet marketing success? You might consider copying my strategy in your own area. For example, a singer might post Tweets of interest to the people in his/her target market (i.e. those interested in the style of music s/he produces).

As the number of followers grows, so does the potential audience for the singer's own product.

It's a simple strategy, but one that's not so easily copied. There's a lot of work involved in tracking down 28-29 pieces of content, and then scheduling it to be posted. If you're like me, then you're asking yourself whether or not it's worth it. Yes it is, and I've posted my own economic justification in this article (long story short - I save £400 - see the article to find out why).

I use TweetLater to help with this task, as it allows me to set up tweets in advance so they go out every 50 minutes - whether I'm online or not.

Is it worth catering to mobile web users?

It's now possible to surf the web using mobile devices, and online marketers have pondered whether or not it's worth catering to the constraints imposed by the tiny low-resolution screens typically found on such devices.

An article in MediaPost has some sobering statistics that help answer that question, at least with respect to web developers considering which platforms to support. To cut to the chase, the medium still has a long way to go. The following point is especially telling in my view: Imagine Facebook...depending on what type of PC...someone was using for their success.

In other words, you may find you have to develop the same application for several platforms. Unless your market is a mobile niche, why would you bother?

Lead Generation Leverage

I use the word leverage in lead generation to refer to an additional persuasive element introduced after the offer, and before contact details are collected. It goes like this...

1. A problem experienced by the target market is raised. I offer to solve it instantly, right there on the site. That's the offer.
2. My lead generation system asks the questions necessary to deliver the solution. The resulting data tells me a lot about each prospect.
3. My system delivers the solution (usually information).
4. Sometimes the information is complex, and expert help is required. Sometimes the information calls for implementation, and either expert help is required, or the prospect is too busy to do it themselves. Sometimes the answers given in step 2 reveal something the prospect hasn't yet done. The system offers expert help from industry insiders (e.g. to find and book the perfect venue in the case of a person looking to book corporate entertainment for an upcoming venue).
5. If the prospect says 'yes' to this help, I then (and only then) ask for contact details and a best time to call.

Contrast this gentle approach with ham-fisted attempts to grab your email address the moment you arrive on a web site. The site owner has done nothing for you, and made no attempt to find out what you're looking for. And now s/he wants to add you to his/her email newsletter.

My approach applies leverage at exactly the right moment, by offering prospects access to expert help to complete a task that has to be done. Which is why it works so well.

How come 'free' doesn't work?

Once upon time, the word 'free' reigned supreme in the world of lead generation. If you needed to boost response, you added a free offer.

There were rules, of course. You couldn't give away any old thing. The ideal free gift had to...

• Appeal to the target market
• Compliment the main offer
• Convey some kind of added value.

This last point (added value) is the reason why I think free gifts no longer work on the Internet. Every two-bit online business out there throws in at least one free offer. In fact, one sales page I looked at included 8 free gifts.

The problem is, when everybody is doing it, the value falls to zero. Especially when you consider the freebie is usually some kind of download. And all of us have downloaded something, only to find it months later when looking for stuff to delete.

I think most of us view free downloads as essentially being without value. And if that's the case, the freebie has no power to generate action. Which means it's no longer useful in lead generation on the web.