If you ever find yourself with a few hours to kill, and want to learn a little about perspective in online mar
keting, call a handful of Seattle area web designers and ask them what they think the key to a successful online marketing campaign is. The amazing thing won’t be the answers you’ll get – which will probably revolve around search engine optimization, utilizing social media, e-mail newsletters, and other similar strategies – but that you’ll get so many different answers to start with.
Which one of them is the right one? What is the real key to successful online marketing?
The truth is that it’s any of them and all of them. There’s no way to know exactly what tactic you should be using for your particular business situation without finding out all the specifics. And what’s more, it’s never really so much about how you’re marketing online, as is your approach to finding business over the Internet.
Allow me to explain: no Internet marketing campaign starts out being perfect. In fact, more than a few aren’t even profitable from the beginning. Certainly, there are things you can do to get moving on the right foot and tilt the odds in your favor, but the point is that you’re very unlikely to begin by getting the results you’re ultimately hoping for. And so, the real secret isn’t in deciding whether to emphasize certain SEO keywords or landing page offers; it’s in constantly testing and refining everything you do.
Never take it as a given that your campaigns are doing as well as they could be. Instead, always look for ways to increase your response rate by a couple tenths of a percentage point, or convert a few more visitors into buyers each week. This means making small changes as well as big ones, having separate versions of different pages and closely tracking the leads and sales coming through your website. In other words, it’s hard work, which is why a lot of companies don’t bother to make the effort. They’re selling themselves short, however, because the most dramatic gains in Internet marketing usually don’t come all at once… they arrive after you have successfully refined your messages to the point where a high number of potential buyers respond to them.
That leads us to the second part of our secret: start small and expand relatively slowly. I say “relatively” because what seems gradual to a five person company is different than what amounts to a cautious approach from a Fortune 500. In either case, however, it’s almost always a better idea to take things one step at a time – building gradually on a campaign that’s making money, rather than pouring lots of dollars into unproven ideas that may never pan out. It’s a hard lesson to learn, but an important one: just because something works for one marketing campaign, or one company, doesn’t mean it’s going to produce the same kinds of results another time. Untold businesses of all sizes have burned through small fortunes figuring that out.
Work long and hard enough at finding business over the Internet, and you will discover the real secret to successful online marketing campaigns – at least for your company. Do yourself a favor, though, and make it a process of constant improvement. It might not be as easy as writing a check and walking away, but we can promise you’ll be glad you did in the long run.
Did you miss our article on the best way to improve your online marketing messages? If so, you can read it now by clicking here!
Want to spend less time reading about online marketing methods, and spend more time working with new customers? Blue Sky can help. We’ve been building websites and online marketing plans for Seattle organizations of all sizes for more than 10 years. Call us today and see what we can do for you!
