How to get started

Step One is always Market Intelligence.   Until you fully understand what search terms will drive traffic to your website, free or paid, you cannot properly design a sales-focused website, write an email marketing campaign, design a paid online ad, or write a blog entry.  And until you know the costs, so you can estimate the ROI, you can’t evaluate whether the effort will be worth it.

Step Two depends on your situation:

• The logical Step Two is your website.  All your Paid Internet Advertising, Email Marketing and Social Media campaigns need to drive traffic somewhere, so making sure your website is designed for sales and optimized for traffic is logical. Mini-Case Study:  We recently performed Market Intelligence for an auto leasing company whose website was almost invisible to Google.  Because they used “frames,” only one of their 28 pages of content was being indexed by the search engines.  As a result, the only way to find them on Google was to search directly for their name.   There was no point in pursuing any other web marketing until their website was completely redone, without frames.
• However, we often see customers “in crisis mode.”  If you need an immediate boost in sales and/or traffic, the fastest way to get results is through Paid Search Advertising.  Mini-Case Study:  We recently worked with a water park who already had an exceptionally good website.  They were getting about 8,000 unique visitors each month.  The site had great functionality — you could book reservations online and view live webcams of the park.  However, given the economy of 2008-2009 and its impact on their business, they needed to triple traffic in a very short time period.  The solution?  A very aggressive Paid Search Advertising campaign, buying the traffic they needed.
• If your web site is already quite good, then adding Email Marketing to your online sales process makes a lot of sense.  Once your copy is written and a process to implement Email Marketing is built, it is very inexpensive – and very effective.
• Lastly, we’ve yet to recommend Social Media as Step Two.  It is true that any company that provides a service or product to the general public and can dedicate resource(s) to social media should do so. Monitoring opinions from the public and replying to them in a dialogue is of immense value. So is pushing marketing efforts to those who have interests in your vertical market or product.  However, given the extremely rapid changes in Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace and others, if you haven’t optimized your website and aren’t fully utilizing the other marketing tools above, we do not recommend you dabble in a professional social media program.