Internet Marketing Strategy - Website Strategies

In the below video, Tim Berry, MD, talks about the importance of having an internet marketing strategy. I’m going to type out what he says for those of you who have slow internet connections.

Internet Marketing Strategy: Important Concept to Grasp

Having a marketing strategy is one of the most important concepts that you need to grasp before you begin your online marketing career or before you begin online marketing for whatever business you have, including network marketing. The concept that we’re going to cover is the difference between strategy versus tactics. And I want to tell you, it took me several years to really grasp this. It was actually several years before I first about the difference and once I found out about it, it changed my career online forever because it became more efficient and more effective in everything I was doing. The reason most businesses fail online – especially online – is that the business owner doesn’t know the difference between a business strategy and a tactic.

Internet Marketing Strategy: Business Strategy VS Tactic

We’re going to talk about those differences so that you can understand the importance of developing a good strategy. Number one, it’s going to save you a lot of money. It’s going to save you a lot of time, which is the most important thing. A good strategy allows small businesses – especially home businesses – to more effectively utilize their limited resources. I mean let’s face it, we’re not billion dollar companies. We don’t have unlimited supply of experts out there that we can go to for help. So we’ve got to have a good solid foundation before we start implementing various tactics and tools. And finally, developing a good strategy forces you to think more about your purpose and commit to a solid game plan. And that’s the key. I think sometimes we get swept away in this online marketing world with all these fancy new tools and the new software out, and we forget about our main purpose and our objective about what we are trying to accomplish.

Internet Marketing Strategy: Keeps you focused

So as long as you have that marketing strategy lined out it’s going to keep you from veering off course and getting distracted. Having an Internet marketing strategy is going to allow you to decide which tactics are congruent with your overall plan so that you can utilize them to achieve whatever results or whatever goals you want to achieve. Having just a handful of tactics without that strategy will almost certainly lead to failure. Plus it’s a big waste of time as I already mentioned. I call it pinball marketing. When you start working online you are going to start getting e-mails from different experts and e-mails about the experts that they are endorsing. You are going to get to see all these great tools and the more you research them you are going to realize that you need some other tools and other tactics and other e-books and information products. And before you know it, you are jumping all over the place. You spent a fortune. You haven’t done one single thing that’s congruent with your overall business plan. And like I said it ends up being a big waste of money. You get a lot of doubt, you get depressed, and you give up. I mean you can really kill your business just by getting swept away in all that. So, having that strategy lined out first and understanding your purpose is critical before you start implementing any tactics.

Internet Marketing Strategy: Short Term and Long Term

The difference between strategy and tactics is number one, strategy is a longer term plan, whereas tactics are shorter term actions that utilize tools, tactics, resources and services. I say that strategy requires commitment, whereas tactics require testing, tracking and tweaking. They require a little more day to day work, whereas the strategy is your commitment over the long hall. Over a period of time. Perhaps a year. Strategy is your roadmap for your overall plan. Whereas, a tactic is a vehicle for the trip. So those are just some analogies that I like to use.

Internet Marketing Strategy: Very Important

I heard a great marketer, Steven Pierce, once say, “An acorn does not necessarily equal an oak tree. It’s certainly necessary, but it’s not sufficient. There are a lot of other things that go into it, including sunlight, rain, soil, minerals and different things.” But, unfortunately, in the online marketing world, most marketers think acorns. They are looking for acorns to keep planting acorns and thinking that they will have some miracle result. But they need to be thinking the oak tree. They’ve got to think the whole tree, and that’s the business strategy. So I hope that makes a little more sense to you now. You need to be aware of this and you need to develop a strategy ASAP or you are going to be wasting money and time every single day from here on out. When I work with students and businesses, I will not work with people who do not have that strategy. And that goes for all types of marketing. I hope this has been helpful and I hope it makes a lot of sense. Go make that plan!

Hope you enjoyed the Internet Marketing Strategy / Website Strategies blog entry and video. Feel Free to comment

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Self-Generating Demand: How to Use Word of Mouth to Sell Your Product

Mckinsey & Co. developed a list of ideas that can launch effective word of mouth (WOM) influence.

Design the Product to be Unique or Visible
The only innovations that are worthy of buzz are those that have something unique about them and are visible. The new Ford pickup truck probably wont get much buzz attention, but something like the new Hummer concept probably will. The innovation also has to be highly visible or has to confer status. If a lot of opinion leaders are invited to a pre-showing of a movie, it would be an example of conferred status. It gives a sense of status to the individuals. If wow is a good word to describe your product then you have probably mastered this principle.

Select and Seed the Innovators
Innovators are the ones that try an innovation before anyone else in that area of interest. As a marketer for your product you should try to identify this group of people and then do as much as possible to encourage this group to adopt your innovation.

Ration Supply
The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. People have a strong desire for things that they cannot own. Therefore marketers find the use of scarcity to be a very useful tool in generating demand. Think about the craze for the Sony PS3’s. People (including me) waited in line for days to make sure they got one as soon as they came out. It became an epidemic. All the available PS3’s were sold immediately on the release date.

Use Celebrity Icons
When celebrities use something it generates excitement about the product. Enough said.

Tap the Power of Lists
There are top lists for everything. Top restaurants, top colleges, top golfing locations, and your name it. If you can get your innovation or company on a top list it will help consumers cut through the advertising clutter and find you more easily. It is also a very useful tool for buzz creation. So find some list and get on it. Well not all lists, it might not be a good idea to get on the “Worst You Name It” of the year.

Nurture the Grass Roots
And no, I don’t mean the little plants in your lawn, I mean the process of getting the adopters to get other consumers to adopt too. Try and create incentives that will encourage the adopters to spread the word about your product. Maybe you could offer and discount if they get a new person to buy your product or use your service, but whatever the case, don’t rely on letting word of mouth spread on its own. Help it along.


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Word of Mouth: Viral Marketing : How to Get People Talking About Product

“Buzz” isn’t something that just effortlessly happens. It is something that needs the active participation, careful planning, and integration. It is essential for marketers to influence the type of buzz that occurs. You can’t just sit back and hope that positive word of mouth will happen by some random chance. The term marketers use for the process of generating positive word of mouth influence is appropriately called buzz creation. There are also other terms that are used to describe this process that may be more familiar to some people. These terms include: diffusion marketing, street marketing, guerrilla marketing, and viral marketing. This process is both planned and organized in such a way that will encourage positive information to be spread about a certain brand, product, service, and etc.

Some of the most successful products obtained there success through the effective use of buzz creation. Apple regularly influences word of mouth communication to help launch its products. As the video in the previous entry talks about, the CEO of Apple, Steve Jobs, used buzz creation to turn the company around. He created something new and something that would be talked about – he created “cute” computers by using a unique design and color combinations (see video for more information). One of the most important aspects of creating buzz is creating something that is very innovative and very unique.

Imagine your target market network as being like the airline transportation network. The airlines have a few main airports into which most of the flights are routed through. These main airports are called hubs. For example, a hub would be considered the New York JFK International airport. If you wanted to take a flight from San Francisco to Niagra Falls NY, you would probably have to first land at the JFK airport and then take another flight to a smaller airport in Niagra Falls. The Niagra Falls airport would be considered a node airport. Similarly, with word of mouth influence there are those individuals who are highly connected are like the hub airports, they are responsible in some way for most of the traffic, or in this case, influence. The individuals with less influence are like the node airports, they have some traffic, but usually only if they have had some influence with the main hubs. The nodes in the buzz network are similar; they have some influence on buzz, but that influence is limited, and without the “hubs” can’t reach much of the target market. Therefore, it could go without saying that the key to creating a buzz epidemic is to get essential information to highly influential / connected individuals (commonly referred to as influentials.

In my next blog entry I will be discussing specific steps that can be undertaken to create an epidemic. So check back soon! Let me know what you think and if you have any questions.

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