Marketing Management

You may think you need a lot of money to get started in internet marketing, and you may think it’s extremely complicated. While it’s true, you can spend quite a bit of money on bells and whistles and some of them are really valuable and help you get great results from your internet marketing campaigns, it’s not absolutely necessary. You can get started and get good results with free tools and programs available online. As far as complexity goes – it’s really only as complex as you make it. Keep it simple, and it will be simple. The keys are study and stick-to-it-ivity!

You need a website to build good internet marketing campaigns, but you don’t have to spend a fortune or even a penny. Google “free website” and look through the results you get. Good free website providers have lots of tutorials and instructions to help you every step of the way. Have a look at some of the sample websites and pay attention to which providers resonate with you, which look the most user-friendly, and which have the possibility of converting to a full-service website with your own domain name when you become successful and need to expand.

As you begin planning your internet marketing campaign, ask yourself the 5 W’s and H:

1. Who is my ideal customer?

2. Where can I find ideal customers?

3. What will attract them to my website?

4. When am I most likely to be able to catch their attention?

5. Why should my ideal customers choose my product over others like it?

6. How can I get my ideal customers to visit my website and buy my product?

This is a simplified version of demographics research. Instead of hiring an internet marketing firm to take surveys and crunch numbers, first brainstorm with yourself. Search the internet for other websites selling products similar to yours and study their marketing techniques. Especially, read their customer feedback and testimonials. This will give you a good idea of the kinds of people who are looking for your kind of product. It will also help you understand why they need or want the product and what they like or don’t like about the products your competitors are selling. Take what you’ve learned and apply it to your website.

Visit and join social networks you see mentioned in customer feedback on competitor’s sites. Find good venues for connecting with your target audience by Googling keywords such as “social networks for X”. Just fill in the X with a term that refers to your target audience, such as housewives, surfer kids, entrepreneurs, gamers and so on. Once you have located some good social networks that attract your target audience, join up and make friends! Let people know what you are doing and share information about yourself and your product. Invite people to visit your website, and be sure to include your web address in your profile and your online signature.

Make your website the best it can be with good search engine optimization (SEO) practices. Use a free online tool, such as Google AdWords, to determine some good, solid keywords that will attract truly interested customers to your site. Write some interesting, unique content about your product yourself or hire a writer to write for you. Be sure your content includes your keywords naturally and comfortably about once every hundred words or so. When you do this, it will be easy for people who are looking for your product to find you. Search engine robots will find you, too and give your site good rankings.

Soon people will begin visiting your website. If you have presented yourself and your product honestly and do a good job of answering your 5W’s and H, you will have just what they are looking for, and your business will start to grow! Be sure to provide your customers an opt-in list sign-up so you can begin building an e-mail list. Keep in touch with them and provide excellent customer service to retain them and gain more good customers for your successful internet marketing business.

Direct marketing, in its more traditional form, refers to a marketing method that involves sending out letters of a promotional nature to a targeted and carefully selected audience group. In more recent years it has become known colloquially as junk mail. That is mainly because of an increase in un-targeted direct mail, meaning that campaigns are often sent out to people who may have no interest in the promotion they receive. This leads to a low response rate and a high number of annoyed recipients of the mail shot.

When direct mail is tightly focused and targeted to a group who have expressed an interest in the subject of the promotion, or even better, are known recent buyers of closely similar products or services, then the response rate can be expected to increase considerably. A “normal” response rate to the average direct marketing campaign is usually around one percent, or even slightly lower. This may seem very low, but when a direct mail shot consists of many tens of thousands of mail pieces being sent out, then the actually response becomes worthwhile and profitable.

This becomes even more pronounced when you consider that each buyer or person who responds favourably to a direct marketing campaign can then be placed on a buyers list and can be marketed to again and again. Those who are known to have bought recently make the best prospects as they tend to be much more receptive to fresh offers. So while a single customer may be responsible for buying once in a particular campaign, he or she can usually be relied on to buy again at some point. This means that the lifetime value of a customer can be many times the initial value.

Direct marketing is essentially unsolicited contact by a business with a possible customer. This makes it quite different to the accepted way of using email, for example, where that type of marketing is considered spam, or an unacceptable form of promotion. Individuals can opt out of receiving so-called junk mail, but it involves a process that most people don’t know about, or can’t be bothered to do. However, when a direct marketing campaign is closely targeted and well thought out, the recipients of the mail usually don’t mind receiving it. They may not actually make a purchase, but as it is something they are actually interested in, they are much less bothered about getting it.

Conclusion

Direct marketing is a highly effective, tried and tested method of promotion. It can be quite expensive to send out a large mailshot, and there is never a guarantee of success either. However, the details of a direct marketing are well known to those who use it and much can be done to limit the possibility of a failure. This makes direct marketing a popular and much used promotional method.

For any business to thrive it needs a marketing plan.

In so many words a marketing plan will discuss where a business is and where they eventually want to be. The plan will then describe how the business plans on getting there.

A marketing plan will be abstract to a point, but must include specific goals. Otherwise, the plan is useless. These goals can range from reaching a certain level of productivity, to opening up a new building. The point is that the document will point out the goal, and show how to get there.

This is where the plan part comes in. The document’s real worth is in how good the plan is. If the plan is any good it will incorporate ideas that are proven to work.

One technique that might be discussed in a marketing plan is using article marketing. The document might discuss how a business will use marketing to their benefit.

In this day and age there are many businesses trying to capitalize on article marketing. Pretty much any business can use marketing to spread the word about their business. For instance, a museum might publish an article about the wonders of history in the local paper. The museum will write this article for free. The hope is that people will read the article and gain a desire to search out history at the museum.

It used to be that such marketing was done through the newspaper. Nowadays newspapers are being phased out. Audiences have shifted over to the internet. Article marketing did not die during the shift. It is alive and well on the internet. Today, that same museum could write an article on history and post it online.

A business usually will not just start doing this without planning it out. There is a certain degree of risk involved with article marketing. The risk stems from the fact that the business involved is working for free. If the article marketing does not work, then they wasted their time. To reduce the risk involved businesses might include plans for successful article marketing within their business plan. That way their employees will be able read-up on how to successfully utilize the marketing tool.

Again, let us look at the museum. Perhaps attendance has been down for the quarter. The bigwigs at the museum are drafting a new marketing plan. They decide to try to use article marketing again, only this time over the internet. They have little experience with this, so they draft out what could best be described as guesswork. When the quarter ends they discover that their plan worked wonderfully. Their article was looked at many times and business was up. Suddenly, their ideas for article marketing have become a staple for their marketing plan.

Every business needs a marketing plan that works for them. It’s the name of the game. The plan needs to work from several angles. One angle that has been successful for some is a good plan for article marketing.