Internet Marketing - Matt Bailey [13]
Part I: Understanding Today’s Internet Marketing
Developing a book on Internet Marketing is a tricky prospect. There are so many “flavors” of internet marketing, and this is no exception. The purpose of this chapter is really to introduce you to the flavor of the rest of the book, the over-arching theme that will resonate throughout each chapter. That is, everything starts based on your business goals, all of the “parts” of online marketing are interdependent, and everything must be measured in order to have a complete view.
Chapter 1: A Holistic Approach
Chapter 2: How Search Engines Work
Chapter 3: Rankings or Profit? Establishing Your Business Goals
Chapter 1
A Holistic Approach
Marketing is evolving at lightning speed with website design and usability advances, search engine optimization, and pay-per-click marketing techniques, website analytics, and social media initiatives all competing for a busy marketer’s attention. But one important core principle remains constant: the need for an integrated approach. In this chapter, you’ll learn the core tenets of a successful, coordinated, integrated approach that involves not just marketers but your whole organization.
Chapter Contents
The Fundamentals of Marketing
The Measure of Success
Make It Right
Who’s at Fault for Website Problems?
Bringing It All Together with Analytics
A Team Approach
Is This for You?
The Fundamentals of Marketing
Marketing online doesn’t start or end with search engine rankings. It isn’t solely dependent upon how well your website is built. It certainly doesn’t depend on how beautiful your website may be. It is a combination of many factors that not only work together but depend on each other in order to provide your company with more visibility online, better customer experiences, and an understanding of proper visitor measurement.
Therefore, the principles outlined in this book are not simply based on a single activity. A single focus, such as search engine optimization, is effective only when paired with additional disciplines. Effective search engine optimization requires analytics, which shows the effectiveness of the optimization, the return on investment, and necessary adjustments to the keyword strategy. Another paired discipline is usability, which tests and analyzes to see whether your website visitors are seeing what they expect and are taking the actions you desire.
Simply put,
Make it right the first time.
Search engine optimization, social media channels, and pay-per-click marketing help people find you.
Content makes people stay and gives them a reason to return.
Usability ensures that your message and visitor tasks are clear.
Analytics tells you what just happened.
The combination of analytics, usability, and testing will tell you why.
So, although there are thousands of books explaining search engine optimization, analytics, website design, and hundreds of other marketing-related subjects, this book is intended to show how each discipline must work together to create a specific strategy. I call that strategy (strangely enough) marketing.
Marketing is the underlying force of this entire book. This is reflected in the rest of this chapter, because the foundation of your website marketing strategy is the key to building a successful presence online.
My definition of marketing, which is based on the classic definition of direct marketing, is this:
Giving the right people the right message with the right offer at the right time
I like the direct marketing definition, because that is the closest to what we are attempting to do online. Much of online marketing is rooted in 100 or so years of the direct marketing industry. The most compelling factor in online marketing is the ability to measure the effectiveness of this definition. In addition, there are many different methods, or channels, with which to use this formula.
What I love about this foundation is that the level of metrics employed by direct marketers