Internet Marketing - Matt Bailey [16]
Without analytics, you cannot put dollar signs in front of improvements. You can’t know for sure whether that new design works better or worse. Essentially, of all the tools in your online-marketing kit, analytics is the toolbox. Without the toolbox, you cannot carry all the tools you need, and you can’t justify adding more. It’s a poor analogy, but I hope you get my meaning.
A Team Approach
A single method of marketing online will not survive. I work with many teams of people who approach projects from various disciplines, but all have to work together to be successful. That means a corporate website will never reach its full potential unless marketing and IT can kiss, make up, and get along in order to develop dynamic solutions that will enable a company to lead the market. Until these departments get along, the website will always suffer.
I have lost count of the companies where I have consulted on their websites only to find that the marketing department blames the IT department for the failures of the website. IT blames marketing for having unrealistic goals. The sales force is simply dismissed as not having relevant information, and those who actually work on the product or have customer interaction have very little to do with the decision making.
It’s a common theme to be working with a company and seeing all the finger-pointing, only to realize that no one in the meeting has ever tried to purchase a product from the company’s website. That, my friend, is a marketing problem, not an IT function. IT’s job is to make sure the website is up and it functions as specified. If people can’t figure out how to get to the next step in the site, that’s a marketing problem.
Businesses need to build an integrated approach to marketing the website and assigning roles based on an understanding of the disciplines needed. The beauty of a holistic approach is the understanding that everything can be measured. If there is a disagreement, then great! Make two versions, and test to see which one is most effective. There are no more assumptions on how the user will react, because the tools are available to get the user’s opinion, not someone’s assumption.
Is This for You?
This is why I subscribe to a holistic approach. Building a successful business online is more than chasing the latest social-media site, more than a number-one ranking in Google, and more than a fancy new website.
Building a successful website is about strategic planning, understanding your market, and concentrating on a specific message. When you know your message, how you spread it will be easy.
This book is intended as a guide for marketing managers who are struggling to “do it all” and keep on top of the latest information. As such, this is also intended for small-business owners who are expected to figure out how to run a website rather than run their business. I hope that it answers questions that you didn’t know to ask.
I find in my consulting practice that even after nearly 15 years of Internet marketing and building websites there is still a lot of myth, skepticism, misunderstanding, and flat-out crappy advice in circulation. The best defense is common sense. The best answers in this industry tend to have a lot of common sense. If something doesn’t sound right, then chances are it isn’t.
So, this is our road map to the next few weeks of going through this text in an hour a day. I will focus first on understanding how search engines work and then on understanding how searchers work. In later chapters, more technical issues will be covered, because even the best targeting and optimization won’t overcome technical problems.
Chapter 2
How Search Engines Work
Prior to beginning any website marketing activity, it is critical to understand how search engines work. This chapter covers the basic aspects of how search engines find and catalog websites and documents and how they determine what is displayed in the search results. Search engines will be one of the highest referrers of website visitors