Developing a Marketing Plan to Achieve Business Goals

Blog URL: byrdcreative14@blogspot.com

Developing a Marketing Plan to Achieve Business Goals

Marketing plans help to keep perspective on budgets and also on price, promotion, place, and product. Today, marketers need to plan not only offline marketing initiatives to build customer relationships but also online. Online strategies can be just as complicated when integrating multiple channels in effort to achieve business goals while building brand recognition. Creating a synergistic effect that integrates Internet and traditional channels to increase customer acquisitions, conversions, retention and value growth is a complicated agenda. To best determine an online strategy, it is important to first identify the target market and to understand their behaviors when using online channels.

Advertising is most effective during the initial consideration stage, whereas past experience has the most impact during the evaluation stage. Yet, in store interaction and word of mouth are the most effective during the closure stage. With varying needs of customers and the different marketing options, marketers require a focused and disciplined process to build and develop brands on the Internet. Most importantly, having a strong and trusted brand is essential to success on the web (Roberts & Zahay, 2013).

The marketing plan needs to build brand awareness therefore I will utilize traditional and online marketing tactics. The traditional marketing efforts include display ads in industry specific magazines that include contact and website information. Additional offline will include participating in targeted trade shows, where key businesses will be invited to join us at the event and for special gatherings. The online focus includes website, video, and social media development.

Each reach is linked to other pertinent information. For example, an online invitation will be sent to key prospects using emails blasts for special events. The website will include a calendar of events that my company will be attending. Links on the website will connect to social media networks in effort to attract more potential customers, retain existing customers, and increase conversion rates. Each channel builds trust using compelling content that other key individuals respond to. Blogs are also key in providing trust and building relationships. Blogs are also an optimal media source for video. Video helps to engage customers helping to build brand awareness. Below are explanations of these various tools.

Brand awareness and brand image must be obtained to gain customer acquisitions. For obvious reasons, if someone is unaware of a brand, they can hardly make a decision about it. Recognition is most achieved through repeated exposure to brand related messages and images. This builds strong brand, which is essential for consumers to build comfort in an unfamiliar purchasing situation such as the Internet. Regardless of the marketing tools or channels used, it’s critical to support brands with appropriate Internet brand development techniques. Brands that strong and trusted both on and offline have an important asset in all stages of the customer cycle; acquisition conversion, and retention (Roberts & Zahay, 2013).

Videos influence purchasing behaviors as consumers spend a great deal of time watching them. Therefore, it is up to the marketers to create video with compelling dialog. This does not necessarily mean costly high-end production services, as often consumers are attracted to an authentic voice with compelling content. However, there are times when high-level production deems consideration for branded content to be engaging. Video is a marketing strategy that can build brand recognition through consistent messages and imagery during the acquisition stage of the customer cycle. Video can also provide information to guide customers during the decision making cycle, while also retaining customers with new and creative video.

Key tools to assist in acquiring, converting, and retaining customers include online advertising, email promotions, social media channels, events and public relations, and offline advertising and promotion. Keeping in mind that any and all of these techniques can and should be used along with traditional tools of offline advertising and promotion (Roberts & Zahay, 2013).

Marketers have various choices when using online advertising. Display advertising includes copy, graphics and corporate branding. Search advertising includes various paid formats like pay-per-click and search engine optimization. Social media advertising typically is a standard display format. Email marketing offers marketers a fast, flexible, format that is easily controlled (Roberts & Zahay, 2013).

Email promotions include gathering customer data, derive customer insight, suggest proactive action, and evaluate response. Gather customer data includes contact information, physical address, and email. Derive customer insight includes information that has been captured about the customer. Suggest proactive action is moving from the analysis to taking action, while evaluating response includes collecting metrics to determine performance and any necessary improvements (Roberts & Zahay, 2013).

Important considerations of email promotions are to obtain permission from receivers and to establish a mailing schedule and then sticking it. A good email plan includes taking advantage of word-of-mouth marketing and social media; this can be as simple as including a “forward to friend” link in the email (Roberts & Zahay, 2013).

Social media has grown, offering marketers another channel to reach customers. Blogs and specific platforms such as Facebook and LinkedIn are of key importance. Although it is relatively simple to create an ad on Facebook but developing compelling content to attract notice can be challenging. All Facebook ads include a “Like” icon, if viewers respond to the “Like” icon word-of-mouth will travel more quickly. LinkedIn is targeted more towards a professional audience (Roberts & Zahay, 2013).

Event marketing is used to acquire new customers and to solidify existing customer relationships. An example of events include, trade shows, exhibits conferences, and seminars. Events are taking on more importance as marketers are developing marketing programs to deepen brand experiences (Roberts & Zahay, 2013).

Offline advertising and promotion is still important as marketers acquire, convert, and retain customers. Using offline to leverage online marketing is a successful strategy used by many marketers. Using promotions thank reference websites and social media networks are key in building brands.

Connecting offline and online marketing strategies helps to build brand awareness. However, without understanding the wants and needs of the target market, no offline or online strategy will be successful. Using metrics and data about the target audience allows marketers to determine the right message, channel and timing. As various channels incorporate compelling content, acquisitions, conversion, and retention rates will increase through brand awareness and trust building efforts.

Reference

Roberts, M. & Zahay, D.  (2013). Internet marketing: Integrating online and offline strategies (3rd ed.). Mason, Ohio: South-Western, Cengage Learning.

Measuring the Effectiveness of Internet Marketing Programs

Blog URL: byrdcreative14@blogspot.com

Measuring the Effectiveness of Internet Marketing Programs

To best determine the effectiveness of an Internet marketing program it is important to understand the difference between metrics and analytics and when to best to utilize them. Metrics are informational, focusing on counting, tracking, and presenting data. Metrics are helpful when needing a perspective on a business because the information is tangible. Analytics are strategic, looking at both past and present data, helping with powerful insights, optimization, and predictions. Since analytics use both external and internal sources they provide an “outside-in perspective.” For example, metrics provide the information as to how many sales reps left in a specific time period. The analytics would help to predict why top performing employees are leaving (Strickland, 2014). Using various informational tools, such as metric and analytics, will provide marketers the opportunity to create effective Internet marketing programs.

Metrics and analytics are a vital part of determining what, where, and how to deliver a marketing program and then measuring its effectiveness. Integrating business metrics and analytics help determine and measure Internet marketing programs. Depending on the goals and objectives of such programs will determine the metric and analytic tools used. Some businesses are interested in improving customer service, while others are interested in sales effectiveness. The means on which the Internet marketing program is delivered will also affect the metrics and analytics tools used. For example, using a webinar as the marketing program delivery choice with the objective of a specific percent of attendance as the goal, the metric provides the tracking of past webinars. The analytics will show how long each attendee remained engaged in the webinar. Analytics can also indicate if any attendees dropped during a specific exchange of information. The metric then compares the attendees of this webinar to past webinars. The analytics results determine if the marketer needs to change or refine any of the content in order to build longer attention times by the user.

Analytics help predict the design of an Internet marketing program and when it is best to deliver it. Metrics determine the target market thereby identifying the audience.  Analytics help to predict the best vehicle and time for the Internet marketing program. For example, our target market is High School teens (metric). The message to be delivered encourages sports participating after school. The message needs to be delivered before or after school hours through the use of cell phones (analytics).

Metrics can capture performance results to determine if the tactical and strategic business goals are met. Although, metrics are important often they are challenging to obtain. Metrics indicate customer behaviors when offline, engaged with social media, and during website visits. Additionally, there are performance comparisons available that include channel and display advertising performance, and marketing campaign effectiveness (Roberts & Zahay, 2013).

Offline is difficult to measure since marketing research or third-party data is most often necessary, while behavior metrics are easier to collect online. Overall, anything that represent and integrated view of various channels and multiple touchpoints are usually more difficult to collect. Conversely, single-channels, campaigns, and website tracking are relatively easy to obtain (Roberts & Zahay, 2013).

Developing new sets of metrics to become more relevant to the evolving Internet marketing efforts will be inevitable. Although almost an infinite number of metrics are available, the key in successfully using them will remain the same. That is to match marketing metrics with marketing objectives. Using SMART objectives, Specific, Measurable, Achievable, and Realistic along with a Timeline helps to obtain information to base business decisions upon. A robust metric platform such as Google Analytics, offers an explanation of how to use it and at times assistance for new users.  Google Analytics as well as virtually all metric platforms provides opportunities to segment data. By doing so, businesses uncover most and least profitable market segments while providing data about marketing approaches that work best and are most profitable (Roberts & Zahay, 2013).

As business goals and technology continue to change it will be inevitable that additional measurements will need to be developed as marketers gauge consumer’s consumption, engagement, and attention. As such, developing new metric tools will be instrumental as business models expand their markets, change their tactics, and use metrics and analytics to increase sales.

Two levels of change will affect Search Engine Marketing (SEM) in the future. Search engines will continue to tweak their algorithms to provide more relevant results. Innovations like vertical, local, social, mobile search, and other yet unseen will proliferate for year to come (Roberts & Zahay, 2013).

Moving forward marketers will no longer simply want clicks, but rather the viewer’s time and most important, attention. Future marketers will look at attention metrics, those measurements that track “total time the audience spends with content and their level of engagement,” Smith, 2015. Attention metrics will measure the time spent with content. Viewability determines whether the message was seen and longevity is the amount of time spent with the content (Smith, 2015). Overall the importance to marketers is to evolve using metrics that translate into something meaningful and material.

References

Roberts, M. & Zahay, D.  (2013). Internet marketing: Integrating online and offline strategies (3rd ed.). Mason, Ohio: South-Western, Cengage Learning.

Smith, N. (March 19, 2015). Attention Metrics: The Future of Measurement in Marketing. Direct Marketing. Retrieved from website, http://www.dmnews.com/marketing-strategy/attention-metrics-the-future-of-measurement-in-marketing/article/404273/

Strickland, P. (July, 10, 2014). The difference between Metrics and Analytics. Retrieved from website, https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140710112644-12003927-the-differences-between-metrics-and-analytics