Internet marketing explained part 2 of 3

Part 2 of 3 - of a paper titled Internet Marketing Explained

- unlike many papers on specific topics this aims to give an overview of how the main aspects of internet marketing all relate together so that a company can build an internet strategy.
Part 1 here.  Part 3 here.

5. Search Engine Optimisation

Assuming that you have a web site you probably want it to be found. These days that means being found by a search engine. The 3 main commercial search engines are Google, Yahoo and Bing.

In order to be found there is an art call Search engine Optimisation. This is setting up your

In general, in order to optimise a web site to obtain higher rankings there are three strategies that can be employed, these are described below.

5.1.On site / page features

Several years ago this was all that SEO was about. Ensuring the pages were laid out correctly and the so called “meta tags “ were set up and that was all that was required.

The importance of the meta tags and on page features is now much less important than it ws but it is still sensible to pay attention to this.

There are many aspects to on site and page optimization including:

Meta Tags – these appear in the “header” html of a page. There are several tags used commonly: Title, Description and Keywords

Where keywords are important however, is within the text on the page. Each page on your site should be giving a message about your company, product or service, and there will be several key words relevant to that. These keywords should be used sensibly on the page.

5.2 External “Back” Links

In the Google SE world, one of its key ideas in determining a SE ranking is the popularity of a site. In addition this popularity is partly determined by the number of other sites that link to it because it provides interesting or authoritative content. Even better is if one high ranking site links to another. The opposite of that is creating a link to a web site from your personal profile on Facebook that is very low interest will have little value.

For these reasons one of the main aspects of an SEO service, today is to generate links into your site from others – so called back links.

So a link building strategy is important but it is hard work and can only be attempted over time. The best links are from other proper bone fide web sites and you need a strategy to encourage sites to link to yours – content is important.

5.3 Content (is King)

Perhaps the most important element is to generate fresh and interesting content – a challenge for many companies see below.

6. Content

In order to attract visitors as well as having a good proposition / service you need to write engaging, fresh and interesting content. Good quality content will encourage users to read more of your site and also will allow you to use it to help create communicates perhaps using social media. It can also be used for other communications such as email.  

 As well as writing for your web pages other types of content to consider include:

Blogs (informal and internal news) , white papers, Tweets, Video, Audio and Podcast, News (external).

7. Social media

One of the major trends of the last two years has been the inexorable rise of social media. These leading players are now household names and include Facebook, Myspace, Linkedin (mainly business) and Twitter.

All these sites help build communities of people interested in many things. A business can use these communities to promote themselves in a variety of ways – blogging, commenting, messaging and advertising.

Social media can be used to generate large volumes of incoming traffic to a web site quickly along with email and PPC and can be a useful tool in the marketers armoury – it can work for B2C as well as B2B.

8. Landing Pages and Micro Sites

We have discussed the relative importance of the website in an overall IM strategy. However, there are two more considerations.

As part of an overall lead generation strategy a company will undoubtedly have regular marketing campaigns. Topics such as product launches are obvious examples.

A launch campaign may incorporate many marketing elements from press releases, events to obviously updating the web site. However, rather than updating the main (legacy) web site there may be a case for creating specific landing pages on the iste or a dedicated microsite if the topic is large enough.

Cases where a MicroSite may be useful:

• Legacy site, urgent requirement
• Large conglomerate with many brands
• Product categories
• A complex site required that does not easily fit within existing site structure or technology.

The main goal of both a Landing Page and a Micro Site is a “conversion” – this may be to phone a number, chat, register details or buy a product or service online. 

9. E-Commerce

The act of selling something over the web involves an e-commerce system. This system allows products to be loaded, either manually or where numbers are large , form another file or database.

The visitor then navigates through a product catalogue putting  items into a shopping cart of Basket. When the visitor is ready the “Checkout” – at this point the user eventually is passed to a Payment Gateway where the credit card details are taken.

10. CRM database - email collection

For many web sites one of the main aims is to collect prospect and  or customer data. As a bare minimum an email address is often captured so that future contact (see section 10 Email marketing) can be maintained. Sometimes just a name and in many cases much more – for instance obtaining an insurance quote.

Depending on volumes, a lot of data could be captured, and this needs to be stored in some sort of data base. The most elementary web sites may provide forms that submit emails to the web master, however this usually means a manual update of a database.

Nearly all commercial web sites provide a mechanism to do this. A CRM system will allow you to design a form that when filled in will create a new record in your CRM system – this lead can be followed up automatically (an auto-responder email) or manually usually by part off your sales or customer service function.

This form can be embedded into your site or a link put on your site to link to this will allow you to capture leads in a structured way and allocate them to the appropriate track and contact strategy in sales or marketing.

Part 3 available shortly  - contact us on 01494 790885 for a copy now.