Have you tried attracting customers through the Internet? I think so. Did it work? I think that even if it more or less worked, there is still a residue that the result could have been even better. Who is to blame for the fact that you do not get clients from the Internet? Of course those who promoted your company on the Internet: SEO, target analysts, sms experts, etc.. They are experts, they have not finished, not immersed, not felt.
Right Reasoning? Unfortunately, no. Now I’ll say the redemptive thing: most likely you alone are to blame. You are to blame for the fact that you have given the implementation of a whole separate sales channel in your business to people who understand almost nothing about your business.
In this article I want to talk about how to act like a businessman or manager, so that the money invested in online advertising and promotion brought a profit, not a headache. No need to take my article as an excuse for dishonest or unqualified contractors, there are plenty of those too. This is not about them.
What is Internet marketing?
To answer this question, we must first understand what any business consists of.
For starters, a business is people. Those who do the work. People need to be managed, taught, punished, encouraged, etc. Then, perhaps the most basic part of a business is the production of goods or the performance of work. The very thing that customers pay you money for. But customers still need to be found, and this task must be done by marketing, which is also an important part of the system called “business”. Just to attract customers is not enough, they need to sell your product or service. Sales Department, get to work! And after the sale, the customer must be served, provide a warranty on the product or periodically perform the work for a monthly fee, it does not matter.
Thus, we can conditionally divide the business into types of work:
- work with personnel (search, training, fines, incentives);
- production, execution of works;
- customer search (marketing);
- sales;
- after-sales work (warranty, support).
Only qualitative performance of all these types of work can ensure business success, that is, profitability. After all, only a business that makes a profit can be considered successful.
What type of work can be classified as Internet marketing? Of course to the marketing activities. That is, Internet marketing is one element of a complex system called “marketing”.
Let’s remember exactly what marketing should be responsible for:
- Positioning the company on the market;
- Defining your target audience;
- Researching the demand and problems of your target audience;
- Adaptation of goods to the needs of target customers;
- Selection of ways to appeal to the target audience (advertising messages and channels).
Logic dictates that Internet marketing is that part of the marketing of a business which is realized with the help of the Internet. That is, it is clear that it is not just the use of SEO, contextual advertising or SMM, it is a full-fledged element in the system of the overall promotion of your business, which must solve marketing problems, but with the use of appropriate promotion tools and channels on the Internet.
What tasks does Internet marketing solve?
As we have already found out, a successful business is a profitable business. And all kinds of work, which are carried out within the framework of the business should be aimed at increasing this same profit. Internet marketing is no exception. Accordingly, the task “to run contextual advertising” can not be the right task for internet marketing, because contextual advertising and profitability are not always identical concepts.
To determine what tasks should be set, you need to understand what the result may be in the form of increased business profits. Let’s understand what indicators directly affect the profitability:
- Number of customers;
- Average bill;
- Marginality, which is the difference between the cost of production and costs.
If you increase any or all of these indicators, you will increase the profitability of the business.
Which of these indicators can be affected by Internet marketing? Since in most cases it is still the work associated with attracting the target audience from the Internet, then we will leave the average check and margin to conventional marketing, and stop at the number of customers.
This figure can be increased in several ways:
- Increase the reach of your target audience. The more people who see our ads, the more they buy. Direct linear connection;
- Increase audience conversion to leads. We need to get the percentage of people who see our ads to leave an order;
- Increase conversion of leads into sales. Increase the effectiveness of the sales department so that the percentage of leads closed on a transaction is higher;
- Increase the number of repeat sales. To achieve that clients after the first purchase would address you repeatedly.
Here, these can already be called the right tasks of Internet marketing.
Let’s consider each of them in detail.
Coverage of the target audience
This is the basic task that will allow your business to grow. Where does the sale on the Internet come from? The user leaves an order on your website (it can also be a group in a social network or a personal page on some portal, but for the sake of brevity in this article we will consider the website as a tool for receiving orders). That is, you need to nag as much as possible to your target audience on your site. This is the main task of Internet marketing. Increased awareness, first place in the list of ads for a particular query, the number of likes per month – it’s all unimportant, if the site does not come to people who are interested in your proposal.
Let’s now understand where in this case your area of responsibility, and where the responsibility of contractors.
What the customer should know and be able to do
- What kind of visitors are needed (CA portraits);
- How many visitors are needed;
- How much are you willing to pay for them;
- Which two of the three characteristics of the work are important to you: fast, high quality, inexpensive.
What a contractor should know and be able to do
- How to attract an audience from search;
- How to attract an audience from advertising systems;
- How to attract audiences from social networks;
- How to reduce the cost of each visitor over time.
Conversion of site visitors into leads
But visitors on the site is only the beginning of the journey to increasing the profitability of the business. It is essential to work on increasing the percentage of conversions of visitors into orders and calls. And what affects this conversion rate? Of course this is the site: its appearance, ease of use, comprehensibility or usability.
Here come to the aid of analytical systems of site traffic. You and I need to understand how people behave on the site, what they like to do, and what scares them, and how to make sure that what scares them would have started to like it. You need to test different versions of the presentation of information, intelligently assess the test results and make decisions on further refinement.
Work on the conversion of the site is very important because increasing the conversion from 1% to 2%, that is just one percent, will give you a 200% increase from the current position, as well as an increase in the number of requests.
What the customer should know and be able to do
- What product benefits are important to the purchase decision;
- Planning promotions and special offers;
- Technical maintenance of communication channels for receiving applications;
- Being ready to adjust to test results (which are sometimes unexpected).
What a contractor should know and be able to do
- Understand the principles of usability of websites;
- Be able to reflect in the design the main advantages of the product;
- Make quality software solutions that work without crashes and glitches;
- Analyze statistical data and present it to the customer.
Conversion of leads into sales
This zone of responsibility lies entirely on the owner of the business, i.e. on you. The quality of the execution of this stage depends on how you have organized the work in the sales department, how competent and interested in the result your managers are.
If the leads come in high quality, but you can not sell them your product or service, then the contractor helping you to implement a strategy for Internet marketing will not help you anything. And there’s one subtle point here. It is very likely that just the work of the contractor you will be evaluated through the prism of the number of sales. And this means that you may have the misleading impression that the contractor is not working well. You’ll ruin your nerves, the specialists on the contractor’s side, and most importantly, you’ll lose profits at a time when you could have just closed the problem on your side and everyone would have been happy.
I won’t even give you a table with the responsibilities of the contractor and the customer, because only the customer is responsible for this stage.
Re-sales
When can a repeat sale take place? Two conditions must be met for this: the customer must be satisfied with the first purchase and he must see your offer when he needs your services again. Of course, they can simply remember you and come back to you on their own initiative. But this works only if the period of re-appeal is small or the transaction amount is large enough and there are no other competitors on the market that are comparable with you in quality, and this is rarely the case. So to remind yourself at the right time will never be superfluous.
I think you’ve already guessed where I’m going with this. The responsibility for this method of attracting customers is divided evenly between the customer and the online agency.
The customer must ensure the maximum quality of product and service when making a purchase and further service. The contractor should find the customer’s previous clients at the right moment and competently remind them that the re-sale should be done in the same place.
What the customer should know and be able to do
- Understand repeat sales scenarios for their products or services;
- Ensure the quality of the product;
- Ensure the quality of related services.
What a contractor should know and be able to do
- Master the tools to find an audience on the Internet based on the customer’s existing customer base;
- Set up retargeting tools;
- Understand which customer benefits are important for repeat purchases.
Mistakes when using internet marketing
The most common mistake is not understanding the tasks that need to be set for a specialist in Internet marketing. Most customers still come to us with the request “do me SEO (SMM, contextual advertising: underline). Read again the section of this article, “What are the challenges of Internet marketing?”
You need to come to the contractor with the right task: increase my user reach, or bring me customers for this service, or tell my target audience about a new promotion I’m launching. Of course, we explain to any customer how to properly form their expectations from Internet marketing, but not always and not all customers are ready to hear us, unfortunately.
The second most common mistake: the mismatch between online and offline advertising strategies. This means that the customer in online and offline advertising uses completely different graphics, slogans, and delivers different benefits.
In the mind of the consumer who comes into contact with advertising on the Internet and other sources does not build a unified image of the company, such advertising can even be perceived as advertising different companies. This is because the customer usually comes to the internet agency after they have ordered brochures, radio ads, billboards and the like.
Agencies which deal with this type of advertising will rarely work with a client to work out their objectives in detail and select a portrait of their audience. Work with them is in the mode of “tell us how – we’ll do it. And in a good Internet marketing agency you will in any case help you to build a marketing work properly, and it may happen that the right strategy will not match the advertising in which you have invested before.
In the conclusion of this article
The best news I’ve heard today. You know who’s to blame for your Internet marketing failures? The contractor, not the customer like I wrote at the beginning of this article. Either way. Either the contractor did a shoddy job, or took on a project whose owner is not ready to promote online.
As a recommendation for success, I will say the following. Remember that Internet marketing is just a tool and a small link in a large comprehensive strategy for your company. Don’t think that you can drop money into an internet agency and get ready customers for your business. That’s not how it works. You must clearly understand what you need from Internet promotion channels and why, and the agency must competently implement your wishes in the form of advertising campaigns, optimized websites, and active groups in social networks.
Only, this is how success is achieved!
