16 online marketing subjects that you need to know about

Online Marketing is one of the fastest growing industries today. As with any fast growing industry, this spawns many specialist subjects within it. There will be many more of these as time goes on but, for now, these are the main ones:

1. Online Marketing Strategy
2. Online Marketing Project Management
3. Keyword and competitor research
4. On-site SEO
5. Off-site SEO
6. Online Traffic Building
7. Social Media Marketing
8. Online Branding
9. Pay Per Click management
10. Paid traffic management
11. Content generation and copywriting
12. Online Reputation and PR
13. Ranking Penalties Remediation
14. Online Buzz and Viral Marketing Management
15. Analytics and Conversion Rate Optimisation
16. Ongoing Website Design

Without any doubt online marketing is where the majority of your promotional budget should be going. Every business should be looking closely at all of these subjects, scrutinising carefully the work being done in these areas currently (if any) and how to start reaching their commercial potential by pushing on these marketing levels heavily.

Below are descriptions of the 16 key subjects that you need to know about in order to reach your business potential. Each subject is succinctly defined, described as to its scope and implementation and then searching questions for your potential online marketing firm are offered to ensure you pick the right one.

Keyword and Competitor Research

Defined: Finding out potential customer search phrases that you need to rank highly for and use in your online campaign and looking into what successful competitors have been doing to gain online insight into your industry.

Scope: Analysing your industry and successful online competitor strategies is a key part of gaining initial online success for your business. You need to find out what are the most searched for terms specific to your industry that are worth targeting. Also, if you were disappointed with an online campaign that you did previously, it is probably down to not having figured out and successfully getting found for the correct keywords. Competitor research gives you an immediate insight into what has been successful and what has not been successful. Often, competent competitors have started their online campaigns before you and have gone through the motions figuring out what works and what doesn’t. Obviously, you do not copy them exactly, but you can gain the valuable insight by having a professional online marketing firm report on a successful competitor’s actions and work your campaign with that valuable information in stock.

Questions to Ask:  What percentage of your initial fees is for keyword research? What competitor analysis methods do you employ? What reports do you provide? What ongoing keyword analysis and research is done? How often do you check in on the competitors?

On-site SEO

Defined: Based on keyword research, this is making all possible technical changes to the site and copy so as to get the maximum long term search engine benefit from your web site content.

Scope: Many sites are not even listed on Google for the keywords they should be. A competent SEO should be able to give a detailed report of specific technical changes that should occur and break them down into varying degrees of importance. There is usually a great deal that can be done to get a site to follow current best practices. This can be part of an ongoing contract as best practices can change frequently and sometimes dramatically. In a competitive market, high quality on-site SEO that is maintained can make a great deal of difference.

Questions to Ask: How do you keep up with SEO best practices? How do you verify the value of keyword research? What do you provide as part of the initial fees? How do you get the findings implemented? What are the ongoing costs and what services and reports do you provide to document the work done and progress made?

Off-site SEO

Definition: (slightly controversial but nevertheless true) Building links and other methods of increasing search engine rankings that are not applied directly to your web site.

Scope: The difference between this subject and the later subjects is the intention behind the techniques. With Off-site SEO the intention is to increase rankings on the search engines as it primary focus.  All other subjects are focused on increasing number of visitors directly. Off-site SEO is the most frowned upon subject in the list as it is the most frequently abused through spam (99% of all online content and emails are spam). Ethical off-site SEO is based upon providing good content and links to your sites around the web in such a way that the search engines respond favourably and rank your sites highly because they deserve it and have been competently marketed online. Be very wary of an SEO company that frowns upon the use of Off-site SEO techniques – if your industry has any worthwhile competition these techniques are being used by them. Stay ahead and follow suit, just do it better and, when possible, sooner.

Questions to Ask: How do you go about your Off-site SEO? How do you compare my site’s campaign to my competitors? How long does the process take? How do you report work done and progress made? Have you ever had a site penalised or removed?

Online Traffic Building

Defined: This is finding various important sites and adding content designed to interest potential visitors and getting them to click through to your web site. It requires a good content generation strategy.

Scope:  This is one of the most important and overlooked areas of online marketing. Your SEO team will put loads of valuable content on the web with the direct purpose of having the search engines crawl it and decide to move the site higher in the rankings. But your online marketing team should be thinking also with putting valuable content that has as its purpose fulfilling people then and there and getting them to enquire or search for you as a result of reading your valuable content in commonly visited web sites such as blogs, forums, and a number of specific high traffic social media and web 2.0 sites. In our marketing analyses we have seen that this factor can bring in the most enquiries dependent on the type of business and the industry it is in. I suggest at least a 20% spend in this area.

Questions to Ask: What are your techniques for online traffic building (not from search engines)? In your experience what percentage of traffic can I expect from working on this?

Social Media Marketing

Defined: Pushing your business through high traffic social media sites as a company, through employees, suppliers and customers and being in full communication.

Scope: Businesses can do well with Facebook pages, Twitter and many other social media and web 2.0 sites. The real benefits come when you get your employees, suppliers and customers to start pushing your business for you. Making your business into a developing social enterprise will set you up for the future and keep you ahead of your competition.  Start thinking outside of the box – who else do you want to connect with? If you had major leaders in your field interested in what you are doing? How about critics, politicians, regulatory bodies, celebrities, charities, journalists and so on?

Questions to Ask: What exactly do you do in your social media marketing campaign and what input is required from us? Do you strive to involve our employees, suppliers and customers?

Pay Per Click Management

Defined: Researching, testing and managing advertising services that you are paying for that charge per visitor click to your site.

Scope: Often this is only look at from the major search engines Google, Bing! And Yahoo. However, there are other pay per click providers such as Facebook (especially) and Miva which do produce results, often at a better cost to sales ratio. A marketing strategy should always have some Pay Per Click budget and plan. Perhaps this is a bold statement, but experience has shown that the most effective marketing strategies have always had some pay per click advertising and management.

Questions to Ask: What is your biggest Pay Per Click client’s monthly spend? How often do you monitor the pay per click costs? What variables is your management fee based upon?

Paid Traffic Management

Defined: This is researching and finding the potentially lucrative paid directories and advertising sites that are paid to list your site in some manner.

Scope: Many start-ups can really benefit from finding the right paid advertising – it can be cheaper than initial pay per click campaigns and cheaper than organic SEO work when in a highly competitive industry. Apart from initial research you will only find successful high traffic advertising sites through trial and error. Put a percentage of your budget towards this and try out a few monthly trials once your analytics are in place to confirm whether or not you are getting valuable visitors from them paid sites or not. A competent online marketing company will have resources to find the good paid sites.

Questions to Ask: Which paid sites should I go on? How do you go about researching them? What percentage of my budget should I put into paid sites?

Content Generation and Copywriting

Defined: Strategising what is required for initial and ongoing content and getting that content written in a professional and current manner that offers value and compels readers to contact you.

Scope: The best copywriter in the world will not get anywhere unless you have given him sufficient details as to what you are trying to achieve. This is one of the few points of online marketing where collaboration rather than surveying your potential customer is the better practice. A competent marketer is very interested in his client: what they do, how they did it, how they became successful, what services are provided, current industry, company history, and so on. A comprehensive content generation strategy is absolutely key to successful online marketing. It needs to cover all the key points of the industry itself as well as good information on the company. Then it needs to continue to generate content that is relevant, very much up-to-date and exceedingly high quality. No online marketing strategy will succeed in the long term without this in place. Do not use a company who even suggest that you do not need to put this into your long term marketing strategy.

Questions to Ask: What about content generation and copywriting? Do you outsource the copywriting? What is the level of collaboration on this? Do you think that content generation and copywriting should be an important part of our online marketing plan?

Online Reputation and PR

Defined: This is working to remove lies intending to damage your online reputation and to make bad reviews or criticism less visible on the web. It includes pushing positive information about your company as well as giving working best practices to online behaviour to employees.

Scope: The last thing you need is for some high ranking bad review, or worse, black propaganda about your company from a disgruntled ex-employee or shady competitor showing up when people search for your company directly. If your company is large in revenue and online dependent it could cripple you and hold you back for years. An important part is in broad promotion of good works but just as importantly, you need to push down the bad reviews and the lies. If you have been unfortunate enough to have suffered from them. Warning! This is one of the least understood subjects in online marketing and must be done 100% ethically to ensure long term success. Do not take on someone you are not confident in for the work as it could end up costing you more to get it done right after more damage has been done.

Questions to Ask: What experience do you have in online reputation and PR? Exactly what are your methods? How can I monitor what is going on? What best online practices for my staff do you recommend?

Ranking Penalties Remediation

Defined: Sometimes the reason for not doing well in the search rankings is down to having been penalised in the past or even removed from the search engines. Getting this sorted out is where this subject comes in.

Scope: If you have a strong domain and/or you have many positive links to your site it is sometimes worth trying to fix up the situation. A good remediation objective is to ascertain what it may take to address the problem and then decide which way to go.

Questions to Ask: What successes have you had in the past? Do you recommend this or starting out with a new domain? Why?

Online Buzz and Viral Marketing Management

Defined: Creating an online whirlwind of excitement and publicity or your company

Scope: Generating online buzz and making something go viral is a very hit and miss affair. You cannot guess what will go viral but you can make sure you give your content and software every chance of doing so. Care must be taken to ensure you do not create negative buzz – companies never really recover from a negative incident that goes viral. Finding a company to work on your buzz and viral efforts should not really depend on past efforts – it takes just one idea well implemented and often marketing firms come up with only one in their entire commercial lives. The main thing is to ensure that you give yourself the best possible chances of making the buzz list and going viral.

Questions to Ask: What do you with content designed to go viral? What major sites do you advertise on in efforts to make it viral? What online buzz ideas immediately come to mind for my company and industry? Who are we trying to create online buzz with?

Analytics and Conversion Rate Optimisation

Defined: Measuring what gains conversions and testing new options to increase efficiency of visitor to enquiry or visitor to sale depending on the business model.

Scope: Many companies are wasting their budgets! Only sites that have a direct sale can really measure what benefits their online marketing is having directly. For example with analytics you can measure which visitors are buying from you. This means that you can measure where those visitors are arriving from. It is harder to do so with enquiries especially phone enquiries. For this I recommend setting up a call-logging system and multiple contact numbers for each mainstream online marketing avenue. This will give an eye-opening picture for some. I remember the first time I proved to a company that their £10,000 per month pay per click strategy was not bringing in a single enquiry. As I said – eye-opening.

Questions to Ask: What software do you use to analyse the data? What conversion rate mechanics do you test? Do you work with a company that can provide multiple contact numbers? What do you suspect based on our current marketing strategy?

Ongoing Website Design

Defined:  Continuing to develop your web site for repeat visitors and to offer more and more value to new visitors.

Scope: I am amazed at the number of businesses that get a swanky new website, pay for an online marketing campaign getting loads of visitors to their site but yet do not continue to develop their site. Your site should be growing rapidly and providing a huge amount of value to new customers and also to be such a huge and constantly updated information resource that visitors will know to keep on coming back regularly to get the latest information. When these visitors are ready to buy you will get the business. So make sure a part of your marketing budget is for ongoing website design. Watch out for designers who charge the earth for small edits or who do not make easy to edit websites. Most website content should be easily editable so ensure this is part of the deal before you sign up for the web site.

Questions to Ask: How do you bill me for ongoing work? Can my staff have access to the backend? Can we edit it ourselves? Can I have all passwords for access to my domain? Can I have the domain fully in our name?

Online Marketing Strategy

Defined: Working out the precise set of steps on all of the above subjects that need to be implemented for a given company’s online marketing.

Scope: This is the overarching plan to succeed with online marketing. It should include work on each and every one of the subjects above and should be worked out for at least 6 months preferably 12 months with room for changes as new developments come about. You chosen online marketing company should be able to provide a sufficiently detailed plan of what they are going to carry out that you can clearly see what they are doing and what involvement is needed from you and your staff. The most successful online marketing strategies combine your experience and drive with your staff’s and the firm’s specialist online marketing skills. The goal is a truly compelling online resource combined with a irresistible social enterprise.

Questions to Ask: How specific will your strategy be? Will it be a set of easily to check off as done points or is your strategy more qualitative?

Online Marketing Project Management

Defined: Putting your online marketing strategy into practice effectively and efficiently.

Scope: The best project management for online marketing is one where all involved are keen and willing to participate. With online marketing the level of participation can be as much or as little as you want. You can outsource all of your social media for example. You can outsource the entire copywriting of you online information resources. The only important points to consider are 1)How hands on do you want your company to be and 2) How are you going to ensure a successful level of coordination in the effort. I suggest a somewhat collaborative approach – individual employee social media should be done directly but the company itself should be coordinated and dealt with by professional marketers using quality copywriters; and of course all technical actions should be done by a technical specialist.

Questions to Ask: Do you offer a single project manager for us? Do you use professional copywriters? What similar projects have you managed before?

Summary:

Find the right people that can answer the questions to your satisfaction!