How do you know Your online marketing planning
You know that dreadful management-speak mantra: “Fail to plan and plan to
fail?” Well, there is some truth in it. If you don’t spend a bit of time planning
your online marketing, you may not fail, but you will probably waste valuable
time that you could have spent doing something more useful. You risk plowing
through loads of very interesting information on, say, Twitter, only to discover
that Twitter isn’t really a useful tool for your business.
Don’t worry it won’t take long, and you can get started with a simple one-page
online marketing plan. You can find a template for this on the companion
website.
Until quite recently, it was common practice to simply jump in and start using
the next, new social media tool, whether it was podcasting, Twitter, or Second
Life. But there is also now an emerging body of best practice and, by following
it, you can save wasted time and effort and avoid embarrassment. There are
some real howlers out there—examples of businesses who have not looked
before they leaped, and got it very wrong. I applaud their enthusiasm—at least
they’re having a go. But it can backfire horribly. Many have learned from their
experience and gone on to create successful social media campaigns. You can
learn from their mistakes. Being open to risk and unafraid of criticism is part of
what this journey is about: Make mistakes, learn quickly, move on.
It is understandable why business owners often ask themselves, say, “How can
we use Facebook?” rather than “How can we reach our market?” Every new
technology brings with it a search for ways to use it. But this is not the most
effective starting point.
Five questions to ask yourself before you start
Your approach, and the questions you ask yourself, should be just the same as for
any of your marketing efforts:
1. What are my marketing aims and objectives? Like any form of
marketing, this is the starting point—not the marketing tool itself.
2. Who is my target market? Know your audience. What is your niche?
What unique value can you offer?
3. Where can I find them? Where does your market hang out? Use online
tools to find your community of interest and tap into it.
4. Which tools are most appropriate to use? Which tools will both reach
your market and be possible for you to manage realistically?
5. How will I measure my results? How will you know if you are
successful? What metrics will you use?
Note that the choice of tool comes way down the list. It pays to think
strategically about how you choose and use tools described in this book.
The other reason for not simply jumping in and blogging, tweeting, or
networking is that there is an art and etiquette to these things. It is important to
understand the culture of social media—it is all too easy to misjudge when,
where, and how to use social media, and end up annoying people by spamming
them on Twitter with your marketing message rather than engaging your
community of interest with useful content. Stick to the core principles of social
media, and you won’t go far wrong.
Effective online marketing
It’s not just the tools you use, but how you use them. To make your online
marketing work hard for you, do the following:
1. Engage people with valuable content. Create content that people will
value and pass on. This may be in the form of blogs, photos, podcasts or
video. There is a bit of a myth about viral marketing it doesn’t have to be
videos of people dancing on running machines, baby pandas sneezing, or
other cool stuff the kids will pass on. It just has to be useful to someone.
Interesting, engaging and informative, and likely to help your target market
in some way. That may be a blog post explaining how recent tax changes
affect businesses. It may be a video demonstration. It may simply be a link
to a useful news article shared on Twitter.
2. Be findable. Search isn’t just about Google—people also search on
YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, iTunes and elsewhere. Having a presence on
these sites improves your chances of being found. But also make sure your
social media channels are easy to find link between them, and include a
little “social media cloud” of icons on your website that link to your
presence on social sites. Then make it easy for other people to increase
your findability: Encourage pass-on by using social bookmarking buttons
on blog posts.
3. Use calls to action. These are not used often enough in online marketing.
You’ve gone to a lot of effort to get people on to your website now tell
them what you want them to do. That may be to sign up to your emailnewsletter, download something, buy something. Use calls to action on
your social media too, at the end of blog posts, podcasts or video, or in
your social networking status updates.
4. Use multiple tools—their combined effect is greater than the sum of its
parts.
Manage the workload
“This is all very well,” you may say, “but where on Earth am I going to find the
time for all these blog posts and status updates?” It’s a fair question. In our
always-on culture, with a constant demand for information—and free
information, at that—it can seem impossible to keep up. We will look at ways to
manage the workload for each tool, but if you follow these general principles,
you will be able to avoid working all hours like a social media Stakhanovite:
1. Plan your media and resourcing. Audit your existing social media and
reuse and repurpose material where possible.
2. Encourage user-generated content, whether Flickr photos, video
responses on YouTube or blog comments.
3. Share the workload with multi-author blogs, and multiple logins and
admins for Facebook pages or Twitter accounts.
4. Leave a digital footprint wherever you go rather than updating
multiple sites all the time. Use sites such as FriendFeed that aggregate your
updates, RSS feeds and bookmarks then import that feed to your
Facebook page or display it as an RSS widget on your blog.
5. Use multiplier effects. Automatically tweet your blog using
www.twitterfeed.com. Pull your blog into Facebook using the Notes
function or an RSS app. Make your Twitter status automatically become
your Facebook status.
6. Integrate social media into your working life with desktop applications
such as www.tweetdeck.com.
7. Set aside time. Finally, there is no substitute for finding time. Set aside
time to work on your social media as you would for any other marketing
activity.
Finally, don’t be afraid to ask for help if you need it. There are online tools to
help you do that too, which we will look at in.
You can write a 50-page marketing plan if you want. You can include a SWOT
analysis, MoSCoW analysis, Boston Matrix, and any other number of strategic
theoretical tools that are beyond the scope of this book. Or you can actually do
some marketing. Don’t get me wrong planning is a good thing, and if you’re
writing a college assignment or seeking investment you probably will need a
longer document. But if, like most of us, you don’t have the luxury of time, you
can write your marketing plan in a single page. What’s more, you should be able
to distill your entire marketing plan into one page. It’s a good discipline that will
keep you focused on the core aims of your business.
“you can write your marketing plan in a single page”
Here are the things you need to focus on:
1. Marketing aims and objectives. What are you trying to do? Raise
awareness of a new business? Differentiate yourself from the competition?
Communicate the benefits of a new service?
2. Positioning. Where do you sit in relation to the competition?
3. Target market. Who is your ideal customer?
4. Market niche. Who is your community of interest? Where do they hang
out?
5. Marketing tools. Which tools will you use to reach them?
6. Calls to action. What do you want them to do?
7. Measuring success. How will you know if you’ve been a success? What
tools will you use to measure your results?
Here is your fill-in-the-blanks marketing plan template, which you can also
download from the companion website, along with a sample filled.
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