There are a lot of things to consider when planning your internet marketing strategy. Even if you run an offline business, and are simply doing internet marketing to bolster you offline sales, you need to carefully plan your strategy.
One of the greatest things is to consider your customer.
Who are they?A good internet marketing strategy answers those questions.
What do they want from you?
How did they find you
and
why you?
To help you create your own plan let's use an illustration.
Who are they?
Majority of online business owners do not know who their ideal customer is. They may a foggy picture of who they think would be interested in their product but they couldn't point them out and say indefinitely "that's my customer!"
Part of that is due to poor planning and failing to actually get to know the people your website brings in.
A good example of this is a woman I know built a site hoping to attract women in their thirties, but ended up having a web browser base of retirees. She completely missed the mark.
If you don't know who you are catering to, you will have trouble meeting their needs. Create a spreadsheet of your ideal customer.
What is their age, gender, habits, hobbies, financial status, what do they read or watch? Something as simple as the colors used in your website will bring in a different crowd of people. As I said before, you need to know who they who so you can find out what they want.
What do they want?
Even if you know who they are, you still have to find out how to meet their needs. What do they want to buy from you? What type of service are they expecting from you?
One of the best ways find out what your customer wants is to look at your competitors.
Researching your competition should be a priority in your internet marketing strategy. Take a look at their site; what are they doing for your customers that you're not?
A net browsing focus group found that if users found a helpful feature on one website they expected it on all websites in that niche.
Signing up for their ezine is a good way to research your competition. By conducting polls and surveys you could also find out what your customers want.
How did they find you?
when you want to quickly find out what methods your customers are using to find you surveys and polls also come in handy. If over half of your customers are finding you through Adsense you know that you should focus your efforts on that.
However, since not all your customers will take the time to answer "how did you find this site?" it's important to take the time to test all your marketing campaigns and analyze the results. What's working and what isn't?
Why you?
Why should your customer do business with you? Even if your site looks seemingly helpful, why should they choose you over another site in your niche? You need to know why you're the best choice for your customer.
Sometimes you are not the best person to do that. You can ask previous clients to write a testimonial as well as work with a business coach to help you learn how to create an outstanding unique selling point.
It will take some effort and time on your part to create an internet marketing strategy. However, as long as you keep asking who are my customers, what do they want, how did they find me, and why should they do business with me you should be able to plan an internet marketing strategy that will bring in repeat customers and sales.
About the Author:
Lyn Troyer and his Niche Power Group teach beginners how to make money online with affiliate marketing. Please visit their online business mentoring website here to learn how you can go from making nothing to a full time internet income in 12 months or less: http://nichepowergroup.com
Source: http://www.submityourarticle.com
Permalink: http://www.submityourarticle.com/a.php?a=51427
