Without advertising any business may struggle to survive.
Whether it is word of mouth, leaflets, display advertising, sponsorships or Internet Marketing – All products and services need marketing and advertising, it is the blood of your business body!
Advertising on the Internet is only one of the many diverse ways that anyone can market a brand(s), product(s) or service(s).
All Internet marketing starts with a simple question: What are we advertising?
From that simple question an entire tree is born, upside down.
To complicate matters slightly, a single product may require a forrest of trees. Each tree representing a different marketing requirement, different strategy, different budget, different everything.
Larger brands may employ multiple “advertising agencies” and small brands may employ only a single “advertising agency”
Read more about advertising agencies
Small, micro and nano businesses, with one or a few owner operators have completely different requirements
Read more about the basics of advertising
All marketing is about BRAND (name)
A brand becomes known by doing marketing
A brand can become a household name and even repalce the common names of other things. An example would be an APPLE.
Without marketing nothing will happen. Even word of mouth is marketing. Even you offering a product to someone, is marketing.
Marketing on the Internet is fraught with many challenges but there is one golden rule:
Testing Testing and Testing.
Whatever marketing you do on the Internet : Install metrics and visitor reporting on your own website.
Run multiple campaigns and run campaigns in such a fashion that they are identifyable, for example: When you offer a new special, new product or do a new sponsoirship: At the very least, create a unique landing page for that campaign. this allows you to at the very least see hom many times that page was requested.
Of course, depending on the software you use for yoru reporting, you are able to see a lot more detail and use a lot more data and apply the lessons learned from your own reporting, to your future campaigns.
Internet Marketing
Required for you to OWN and CONTROL:
1. A brand or service main domain
2. Feeder or content or platform websites, domains (or sub domains or sub directories of the main domain)
External Requirements (Which you DO NOT OWN or control)
1. Social media accounts (Examples: Facebook,Twitter, Youtube, TikTok, etc)
2. Free blogging platform accounts (wordpress.com (different from wordpress.org))
3. Search Engine advertising accountsPPC and PPM google Paid Advertising Accounts (Example: Google/Duck/Bing)
4. Publishing accounts on industry websites and industry partners
The last requirement is a written Internet Marketing plan.
a Written Internet Marketing plan should include details of your brand, details of your overall marketing strategy, details of dovetail with your general marketing plan, details of your budgets, targets, specifications and even define your initial campaigns.
Your Internet Marketing Plan has to contain your metric strategy, your Statistics, reporting and data strategy.
The most important thing about Internet Marketing is ANALYTICS.
1. You MUST always control your own data collection and consciously decide who to share any of your data with. (this means that you CANNOT subcontract this to an existing supplier, either do it yourself OR appoint a new supplier)
It is unbelievable but: There are IGNORANT companies that use their advertising agency to collect their data and to report to them how effective that agency is… These companies tend to lose business, lose market share and not grow as fast as their competitors.
2. You must USE your data to inform future decisions. (Collect/Interpret/Report/Summarise) – Again, it cannot be more clearly stated: Do not use a vendor to track the same vendor or other vendors camplaigns performance!
3. TEST TEST TEST – Adjust your data collection strategy to match newly identified requirements!
4. ONLY allocate BUDGET (Money) AFTER you have run a pilot campaign and you are able to use metrics to inform expected results!