When doing any form of consulting, the first question I ask is “What’s your online marketing strategy?”   Other than the odd email campaign and perhaps some Pay Per Click advertising there is typically no plan.

Having a written plan is essential to measure success, if objectives for your website are being met and if you are getting a good return on investment.  The choices for your marketing time and budget are enormous, with options ranging from viral marketing, social media, online display or affiliate advertising to targeted permission email marketing.  The secret is not which tool you choose but which objectives the tool helps to fulfil.

By creating a 5-page web strategy and sharing it among your team, it is my experience that you are substantially more likely to get the results you need.  The 5 pages could look like this:

1. Marketing Objectives (Build brand, increase opt-in consent, create sales, get people to attend events etc)
2. Publishing Schedule illustrating actions such as publishing dates, responsibilities and deadlines.
3. Engagement Policy – when a customer engages, who answers?  What are they allowed to say?  What types of comments require authorisation for a response?  What types of engagement do you ignore?
4. Results Matrix is used to measure your efforts net affect.  For example, how many doors you opened, the number of new opt-in email addresses you received or the amount of people signing up for your event.
5. Review Outcomes page is reserved to record the thoughts and changes in direction of the campaign as greater insight and experience is gained over time.   Comparing the actual outcomes with the published objectives often leads to a shift in objective and greater opportunities emerge.  There is no harm in this as long as the objectives are not being changed to match the results matrix.

The greatest advantage of an online marketing strategy compared with offline activity is that your plan can change much more quickly as your experiences change.  This is because you haven’t had to commit to heavy production costs.  So review your activities in accordance with your plan regularly and don’t be afraid to change it for the better.

In a movie called Field of Dreams an Iowa corn farmer, hearing voices, interprets them as a command to build a baseball diamond in his fields; he does, and the Chicago Black Sox came. 

Kevin Costner was lucky in the movie.  He didn’t do any marketing and yet the objective of filling a stadium full of people worked.   The unfortunate thing about a website is that unlike the Farmer’s baseball diamond, it is lost in obscurity and unable to fulfil its objective unless you market the fact that it exists.  

How we find websites is rarely due to off-line marketing efforts.  It is usually arrived at by way of links we find while researching, search results, forwarded recommendations and social media or as a call-to-action in our online marketing.

So when creating a website be aware “build it and they will come” – to quote the movie, only works for people with voices in their head. You need to build an online community.  That takes strategy.  Get the strategy right however and Chicago Black Sox will appear.