Lesson 1: Internet Marketing Shouldn't Suck
This is a the introductory lesson from an internet marketing course I'm about to launch. Thanks for taking the time to read it. I'm creating this course for you. If you have ways you'd like to see it improved, you can e-mail me at ian AT portentinteractive.com, or leave a comment on the blog post referencing this sample, here.
All material on this page is copyright 2008 Portent Interactive.
In This Session
By the time you leave this page, you should understand that:
- The quality, not quantity, of potential customers matters most.
- Internet marketing is a strategic discipline, not a collection of tactics.
- Effective internet marketing can engage your customers and potential customers in a genuine two-way conversation, and continuously refine and improve your business based on that conversation. Failure to do that is a lost opportunity.
And, hopefully, you'll also understand the basic rules of our internet marketing method, Conversation Marketing.
The Big Question
Why does internet marketing suck? This is not a rhetorical question. It's a question I was asked three years ago by a client and friend, and I've pondered it ever since.
I don't think it does suck, of course. But I know that most folks shudder when forced to consider their online marketing strategy. Why?
Because they make one of the Three Mistakes of internet marketing.
The Three Mistakes
Even the best sites will make one of these mistakes on a daily basis:
- Treat the internet like a broadcast medium: Most marketers and business owners equate the internet with old-style broadcast media. Post message on web site. Leave it there for two years. Hope for the best. That's not the case. The internet is the first two-way mass medium. Next to a face-to-face conversation, it's the only place where you can speak to your customers, observe their reactions, and then adjust accordingly.
- Go ala carte: Folks assume that internet marketing is nothing more than the sum of its many parts: Search engine optimization, web design, e-mail marketing, maybe a few trendy acronyms. Then they try to implement each piece of their strategy separately. Big mistake. That's like building a house by first standing up all the wood, then trying to nail it all together before it falls down. If you ignore how the pieces work together, you can't build anything that'll last.
- Assume traffic equals success: Finally, almost every client I've ever had started with the false assumption that traffic equals success. Wrong. If you've ever seen 10,000 people visit your site and then leave without buying anything, you understand why.
The clients aren't alone in this assumption. Every day I watch world-renowned advertising agencies, individual consultants and every internet marketing professional in between fall prey to one of those three mistakes. If you're the person ultimately responsible for your organization's online success, you need to know how to keep an eye out for these problems.
The Solution: An Internet Marketing Strategy
This session will give you a way to avoid those three mistakes by helping you focus on the core problem in internet marketing strategy: That almost no one has an internet marketing strategy. I'm going to introduce you to the idea that having a good strategy is not only critical, it's also a lot easier than not having one. This isn't about extra effort. It's about better efficiency and getting more for the time and money spent marketing online.
The Method: Conversation Marketing
Conversation Marketing is a method that I've refined and improved over 8+ years. It's a collaboration between myself, my colleagues, my team and my clients, and it works.
In Conversation Marketing, internet marketing is like going to a networking event. There are certain things you do to prepare, to participate, and then to create and capitalize on the connections you make. All in a way that makes your potential customers happy they met you.
It's comprised of seven rules:
- Know Your Goals
- Know the Room
- Dress Appropriately
- Sound Smart
- Brag Modestly
- Make a Connection
- Observe and Adjust
Know Your Goals
Before you go to that nerve-wracking networking event, you undoubtedly ask yourself, “Why on earth am I doing this?” You have an answer, or you wouldn't go at all.
Internet marketing is no different: It's going to take effort. Why are you trying internet marketing in the first place? To sell stuff? Generate leads? Attract future customers? Win an election? Whatever your goals, it sure helps to know them in advance.
Grab a piece of paper and write down the first three goals that come to mind when you think of your online marketing efforts. Really. I'll still be here when you come back, I promise.
From now on, keep that piece of paper. When a member of your team wants you to try the latest, greatest online marketing trick, read those goals again. If this new gadget or tactic won't help, skip it. Simple as that.
Know the Room
Before you go to any event, you'll want to know who's going to be there. No sense talking to 5 competitors when there are 15 great potential customers in the room.
In marketing, we do the same thing with research and personas. Research, even if it's very limited, can give you the outline of your potential online customer base. Personas help you fill in that outline and give you a clear snapshot of your best audience.
Right now, grab that same piece of paper and write down 8 attributes of your best customers. Don't sweat perfect spelling - no one else will see this. Just write 'em down.
From now on, evaluate all internet marketing tactics by looking at those words. Anything you do online must appeal to or exhibit of the 8 attributes you just wrote down.
Dress Appropriately
You don't wear a bathing suit to a formal affair. And you won't wear a 3-piece suit to the beach.
In the real world and online, you need to dress appropriately for your audience. That's appropriately, not cool (unless, of course, cool is appropriate). Geek-appropriate and gourmet-appropriate will look very different when you're designing a web site.
A visitor to your site is going to choose to stay or go in the first 2-4 seconds they look at it. If you're dressed appropriately, they'll stay. If not, they'll go.
Look at your home page. Look at every graphic, every animation, every word. Does everything on the page help accomplish one of your goals, in light of your audience? If not, remove it.
Note that you can't dress appropriately before you know your goals, and know the room. See how that works? You're building your strategy, one step at a time.
Sound Smart
You've done your homework, and you've dressed appropriately, so you survived the once-over. You'd better have something to say, and say it well.
This is potentially the most complex Conversation Marketing rule, because 'saying it well' involves so many different things. I'll summarize, very briefly, here. Sounding smart requires:
- A standards-compliant web site that looks good in the major web browsers.
- A fast-loading site.
- Well-written copy.
- Good contingency design: For example, a 'page not found' error page that actually helps folks find what they need.
There's more, but you get the idea.
Look at your site. Any broken links? Fix 'em. Any misspellings? Fix those too. You're now two steps closer to sounding smart. Now hire a professional marketing copywriter to rewrite your home page - just your home page. Now you're three steps closer.
Brag Modestly
Nothing better than a celebrity leading you around a party saying “This is the guy you have to meet”. Someone else is bragging for you - that's bragging modestly.
Online, that means search engines first, and then the amorphous blob currently referred to as 'social media'. If you can capture a top-5 natural results ranking on Google for 'widgets', then Google is leading you around the party, recommending you as one of the top places to go for 'widgets'. That's a wonderful modest brag.
Social media, of course, can mean lots of bloggers writing nice things about you, or a front-page listing on a site like Digg. Either make great modest brags.
Then come many other vehicles: Pay per click advertising, done tastefully, can still be a modest brag. Even a e-mail newsletter sponsorship or a nicely-done banner can add value to a page and be sufficiently modest to work.
Go to Google and type LINK:[your web address]. Then click 'search'. That's a list of all sites that link to you, according to Google. Only seeing your own web site in the list? Start telling bloggers about your value to the community, so they'll brag about you. And you'd better consider some SEO.
Make a Connection
Finally, before you leave the party, you exchange business cards. You can now call your new contacts, and they can call you.
At a minimum, make a good-quality e-mail newsletter part of your strategy. Even better, include an RSS feed (if you don't know what that is, don't worry about it) of special offers, new white papers or other relevant period content from your site. Then consider a podcast or other subscription material.
Does your site have an e-mail newsletter signup? Do you make a good 'pitch' to your visitors? If not, get to work! Add a 'subscribe to our newsletter' box. Then add a few sentences explaining why they should: For example, “Receive special offers in your inbox...”
“Ian, when are you going to tell us how to do this stuff?!”, you cry. Don't worry. The details come in the next lessons. This first one's about the foundation.
Observe and Adjust
When you talk to someone, your brain makes millions of tiny calculations based on their response. Are they happy, bored, scared, uncomfortable? Then you adjust accordingly.
Your internet marketing strategy must plan how you'll observe and adjust: At a minimum, measure web site traffic, visit quality and conversions ('conversion' is one visitor completing one of your goals). And plan for the adjustments you'll make. Reports are not analytics. What you do with them is. Observe and adjust.
Get access to your web site traffic reports. Get familiar with them, or make someone else in your organization responsible for checking them every day or week. If your web team tells you that you can't have access or can't install traffic reporting, find a new web team.
I strongly recommend Google Analytics. It's free, has all the features you could need, and integrates nicely with Google Adwords.
The Blueprint
Now you've got a very basic blueprint of an internet marketing strategy. Whenever someone throws a new tactic at you plug it into this blueprint. If it fits, and helps you achieve your goals with your target audience, great! Start planning out the tactics. If it doesn't fit, still great, because you can quickly and efficiently make a decision and move on.
The other lessons on this site break down each Conversation Marketing element and create a more detailed plan. If you want to do them in order, start with 'Know the Room', which goes into the specifics of researching, writing and applying personas to all aspects of your internet marketing campaigns.
What Do You Think?
This was just the first lesson in what's going to be a continuously-growing internet marketing training resource. Did you like it? What would you change? I'd appreciate it if you e-mailed your comments to me at ian AT portentinteractive.com, or just entered a comment in the blog entry referencing this course, here.
Subscribe to the Course Notification List
This was just the first part of a future internet marketing training site. If you'd like us to tell you when the complete course goes online, you can sign up for our notification list below:
...and I'll let you know when we launch.
In the mean time, a quick, shameless plug: You can read my blog about internet marketing, buy my book on the subject, or just hire my company.