I’m kicking off my internet marketing series here on RoyalAnts. It makes sense, since my duties here at RoyalAnts include both marketing and business operations. Since I’ve already gone over some of the business operations, I figure it’s time we talk about marketing.

Marketing is vital to the success or even the life of any product. It’s what gets the name out, it’s how people know you’re there. If no one knows about you or your products, you will fail before you even get started.

A mediocre brand/product can thrive with excellent marketing, but an excellent product with no marketing will usually die and a bad product with great marketing will almost always die as well. Marketing isn’t a “cure all” but a very essential part of the equation.

The more creative and engaging your marketing is, the more likely you are to build awareness and gain market share for your company. Keeping in the spirit of our Starting Up a Startup series, we’re going to go over some of the internet marketing basics.

Strategy vs. Tactics
One of the things I notice while browsing the web doing research for clients, RoyalAnts or myself is that A LOT of people seem to confuse strategy with tactics. Sometimes even using them synonymously, which sadly just isn’t the case.

Strategy is the plan used to achieve your goals:

• Goal: Lower your CPS (cost per sale) 
  • Strategy 1: Increase organic SERP ranking (Search Engine Results Page) 
  • Strategy 2: Deploy testing to increase sales from landing pages

Tactics are the methods used within the strategy to reach those goals:

• Focus on keyword driven content
• Employ or revamp a link building campaign to help organic search
• Use Google Website Optimizer to deploy landing page testing to determine best conversion rate
• Rewrite and focus landing pages on specific offers and link to specific PPC ads or banners

FIRST define a goal, THEN make a plan, and THEN measure as you go to monitor results.

Don’t make your goals vague like “I wanna sell more crap” — that’s a given. It’s the entire reason you’re in business. Use specific, definable goals to which you can apply your tactics.

Lead Generation
Ever sign up for a credit card online? When going through the process, there are offers for free vacations, free subscriptions to magazines, and all sorts of stuff. These offers put you on a page where they collect your email and other info and then send you a sales letter describing how to get your “free” stuff.

These services now know you just received a new line of credit, and you gave them permission to target you with vacations, furniture, and other offers. This process generates hundreds of “qualified” leads a month for these companies.

Lead generation is achieved by determining affinity between a customer and an offer. Truly, you need to understand your audience to get the highest quality of leads so take some time to research them. Understand your audience, find what else drives them and how it relates to your product or service and create a process for your success.

Here’s an example of everything I’ve talked about so far:

• Goal = Get higher quality leads for sales department and targeted marketing methods. Also increase overall incoming leads by 15%. 
• Strategy = Create a lead generation program after researching your customers and determining beneficial affiliations.
• Tactic = Placing a “get more info” form in the sign-up process of a related service that gives you quality leads.
  • Tip - Only pay the owner of the related service for completed forms or if possible barter or exchange services. I’ll put your form in my sign-up process if you put mine in yours.

So, now you’re ready to jump to it and take over the world right? Right?

OK, well maybe not, but it’s a start. It’s the foundation for all your marketing plans, or any plans really. Start with a defined goal, come up with the strategies to get that goal, and execute the tactics that will get you there.

Thanks for reading,
Josh “Shua” Peters

P.S. Remember that Google looks at the relevancy of your PPC adwords in relation to your landing page content. If your ad and landing page get higher “quality scores” based on relevance to your bidded words, your ad will show more often than some of the higher bidders. Google relies more on quality and so it’s more important to have good content behind your purchased words than it is to be the highest bidder.

Image by thomcochrane

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Tags: internet marketing, marketing

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 15th, 2009 at 10:50 pm and is filed under Home. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.