A solid business strategy should transcend all marketing mediums. While online marketing is still about reaching your customer and executing your strategic plans, the Web is a completely different animal from offline marketing.
You’ve heard that said before, maybe you’ve even said it yourself. But can you readily identify what makes the Web different from offline marketing venues? If not, integrating your strategic plans with your online marketing efforts will prove challenging.
I’ve had the privilege over the past few months of becoming more engaged with prospective clients. The wide variety of industries, business models and even client personalities never ceases to amaze me. This exposure and interaction is a big part of why I enjoy eBusiness Consulting.
After several client discussions covering the same fundamental principles of online marketing, I decided to address the topic in our monthly newsletter. Specifically, I’ve chosen to pull together a top-5 list of core Emarketing challenges that both marketing and business strategies face when they move to the Web. I’ll explore them briefly in this newsletter and in the next newsletter suggest some analyses and tools to help you address each challenge. I hope you find it as enlightening as I have engaging with you and your business.
The State of Online Marketing
Before we get into the specific challenges, let’s take a step back and look at the larger online marketing landscape.
There is a definite “execution gap” that exists today between business strategy and online marketing. It’s not a knowledge problem…almost everyone I talk to is aware of online marketing tactics. They just haven’t implemented a solution because they aren’t sure which one will best suit their needs.
Taking a wary approach to online marketing can be both an advantage and a disadvantage to your business—cautious and strategic planning are always a wise first course of action, yet failing to act at the right time and in the right way will get your business no where. I frequently have to remind myself that for many businesses, large and small, online marketing is still relatively new, largely unknown and many times an uncomfortable “space” to be. And that’s okay. It’s merely a strange concept for me because the Web has been my place of expertise for years, just like your business and your role within it are yours.
Emarketing – What do we mean?
At Aware, we refer to online marketing as Emarketing. In essence, Emarketing is defined as marketing a business via the Web. Even better stated, Emarketing is enabling a business to execute strategic plans and thereby achieve success via online initiatives. The term “success” should always be defined by your business and should be based on goals and strategies. Some examples are:
- Increasing brand awareness
- Building a customer base/increasing customer loyalty
- Increasing revenue
- Decreasing costs
Emarketing – Our Position
As I’ve already stated at the beginning of this article, a solid business strategy should transcend all marketing mediums. Strategy should always come first—well before any technological initiative or tool. Even at the point of implementing technology, each initiative should be easily tied back to a clear business goal.
It’s easy to forget that marketing online is still about the customer. Emarketing should therefore draw your customers closer to your business and better establish their loyalty. When you think about online marketing in this fashion, the technology easily takes second fiddle.
Emarketing – Unique Challenges
Now for the top-5 core challenges of Emarketing:
Challenge #1: Market Differentiation
Marketing Goal: Achieving Market Differentiation
Market differentiation is driven by competition. Yet, it can be difficult to execute your differentiation or niche online due to the subtleties, newness and complex technology behind the Internet. Questions abound in the face of so much technological opportunity. What code base should your site be developed in? What internal or third-party applications need to be synchronized with your Web site? When is the use of Flash appropriate? Should you invest in content management software? Which Ecommerce software will best meet your needs? It can be overwhelming.
An additional challenge comes in deciphering what your competition is doing online, how your customer base perceives both your site and your competitor’s and the ultimate impact of each on your business. Your competition is faced with the same questions you are asking and interpreting what they are doing behind the scenes can prove even more difficult on the Web because of security and extranet communication methods.
Challenge #2: Customer Perception
Marketing Goal: Determining Customer Perception
Online customers tend to deem themselves as experts and have strong opinions of your online tactics. This attitude isn’t as notable in other mediums like radio and print largely because of how customers interact with the Web. Being online is not the same experience as reading through a brochure or magazine page-by-page or watching a TV commercial that plays through in 30 seconds. Web sites by their very nature are highly interactive and engaging. They require some give and take—a presentation and a user response. With search engines and the never-ending network of hyperlinks that exist online today, users can enter a site anywhere. Sometimes they land halfway down a page. Often they never even see the site's home page. Hyperlinks allow users to bypass any implied order you may have intended on your site. The Internet is a dynamic media in the purest sense.
With so many customer types visiting your Web site, generalized customer perceptions can be hard to evaluate and quantify.
Additional resources:
Challenge #3: ROI
Marketing Goal: Measuring and Achieving ROI
Attempting to measure ROI, or the return on investment, often proves difficult due to a lack of solid costs or measurement mechanisms and often leads to evaluating intangibles like brand image, ease of use and customer loyalty, none of which fit into a rigid financial model. Yet, calculating ROI has become a critical evaluation factor behind many business decisions and the impact of technology initiatives on the bottom line and financial forecasting are just too crucial to ignore in today’s uncertain economic climate.
Challenge #4: Customer Relationship
Marketing Goal: Getting Closer to Your Customer
The Internet is a valuable vehicle to help you drive customers to your business. Sometimes a Web site can facilitate increased foot traffic with promotions and a store locator, other times they can direct customer responses over the phone or through an email. Either way, the Web should help bring your customers closer to you, not drive them away. Yet, how do you gauge your site’s effectiveness at drawing your customers to you? Are you tracking customer responses and following up on their actions, both online and offline? The Web is a unique medium for tracking response rates and conversions, yet you have to engage with the reporting tools and take the time to interpret what the data really means.
Email alone can be a highly effective means of getting closer to your customers. It is personal, measurable, instantaneous, and in most cases lower cost than traditional print marketing practices. However, users have come to expect targeted, relevant, and perfectly timed email correspondence. They’ve grown increasingly impatient with newsletters that waste their time. It’s almost as if they expect you to read their mind, know what might peak their interest at any given point in time and then launch a perfectly timed campaign to capture the opportunity.
Challenge #5: Advertising Placement
Marketing Goal: Controlling Advertising Placement
From an advertising perspective, search engines like Google, Yahoo, Overture and others not only attract a very high volume of online traffic, they’ve also begun to pull in offline customers that would otherwise resort to calling Information or pulling out a copy of the Yellow Pages to locate business, product or service information.
Because search engines canvas the entire Internet and aren’t necessarily relegated to one specific geographical area, customers have a greater amount of information at their disposal than traditional advertising mediums. That advantage for online customers can quickly prove challenging as they try to wade through listings looking for the best fit. Furthermore, online customers have proven to be highly impatient…if they don’t see a relevant listing on the first or second page, they’ll stop clicking.
The vast amount of information managed through search engines is even more challenging for businesses who are forced to compete outside their niche for search keywords that cross industries. A prospective customer can quickly become a lost customer when other business listings rank higher…or when your listing doesn’t appear at all. Ensuring your site will be found amidst so much online content takes diligence and a strategic approach.
Make sure to watch for next month’s newsletter where I’ll suggest some analyses and tools to help you address each of these Emarketing challenges.
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