When formulating an online marketing Strategy, it’s important to consider the following points:
1. How competitive your industry is online
Are you competing against other big brands, with huge budgets, or do you have an opportunity to really create a strong presence in the search engines, with little competition? A few years ago we found a client that sells synthetic turf had an enormous opportunity to rank well in the search engines. There was little competition, and it was a strong growing industry. They took advantage of that, are now leading their industry. You can check how competitive your industry is by doing some keyword research using Googles Keyword Tool.
Google Keyword Tool
This gives you an idea of how many searches there are for the words you enter, and also how much competition there is. You should also run some Google searches of course, and run your eyes down the listings to see what you’re up against.
2. What keywords you would like your site to rank for?
Some words will be more popular of course, and will deliver the most traffic, however if your competition is too tough, you’re never likely to rank at the top of the engines. In industries such as mortgage broking or car loans, you’re up against the big banks, who have fairly significant marketing budgets!! In these cases you can depend on long tail traffic – which is really any other traffic related to mortgage broking but not based on the really high ranking keywords. Instead of mortgages melbourne, for example, you may end up ranking for “low cost mortgages” or “mortgage broker brunswick”, for example.
If you don’t have all that much heavy competition, then you can just go for the top ranking keywords – knock yourself out.
3. The design/structure of the site you want to promote online
It’s important to ensure that your site is capable of converting visitors to enquiries or customers – no point sending customers to a poorly designed website! We often have new customers asking us to optimise a terribly designed site. We do ourselves out of a job, but will recommend they go back to their designers and get a new site built first… or we try and sell them a new site of course! Have a read of example 3 on the Online Strategy page of our website for a good example of how this worked for Album Works.
Album Printer new design
4. Your strategy & budget
There are a multitude of services available; how much you would like to spend will ultimately allow you to choose the most suitable strategy for your online marketing. Choose what mediums you like (SEO, SEM, Social Media, etc), then get some professional advice on what’s required.
