By Chris Biber - Sunday, June 28th, 2009

Whether you’re a startup with limited resources, or a long-established company with a proven track record, online marketing has fast become a compelling part of your marketing toolbox. It offers unique opportunities to conduct market research, to engage with your target audience and to generate leads.

The 4 Bees

Four interdependent steps are required to make this happen. I call these the 4 Bees of Successful Online Marketing:

• Be Found. Ensure that your target audience can find you online.
• Be Convincing. Engage with your audience and convert site visitors to prospects.
• Be Analytical. Use the insights of web traffic statistics to understand visitor behaviour and to further improve your ability to be found and to be convincing.
• Be Integrated. Tie traffic into your business processes. Feed leads into your back-office systems for lead nurturing and follow-up.

The remainder of this article describes the individual ‘Bees’ in more detail.

Be Found

Successful online marketing turns the old “broadcast” marketing model on its head. Rather than focusing on outbound activities attempting to find buyers, the “inbound marketing” model lets buyers find you. This requires that your site uses the keyword phrases that your prospects use when they search for you in Google and other search engines. Keyword analysis tools such as the Google Keyword Tool help you understand which terms are being used by your audience. Working these terms into your web site content to create relevant content is just the first step in being found. The other equally important step is the acquisition of quality links pointing to your content.

Search engines evaluate both the relevance of your content and its importance, measured by how many other pages link to your content. These links come from many different sources – industry portals and online magazines, social media venues that discuss your industry, and many others. A proactive PR campaign and social media outreach is therefore a critical element of your online marketing strategy. An authentic presence in social media also lets you engage in conversations, learn what concerns your audience and become a trusted market participant.

I explore this topic in more detail in this accompanying video.

Be Convincing

Attracting targeted traffic from search engines, blogs and third party sites is not enough. Raw traffic is nearly pointless. It’s the resulting conversions (such as white paper downloads, webinar registrations or product purchases) that matter. Online visitors to your site are in a hurry. No one reads your lengthy prose – no matter how much effort you spent crafting it. Most of the time, a visitor will “scan” the page, look for visual clues, highlights, links and calls to action. This in turn means that content has to be easily “scannable”— can you look at your page for two or three seconds and “get” what it is all about? Make sure that your pages answer the following questions:  What is this page about? Is this content authentic? What’s In It for Me (WIIFM)? What should I do next?

Be Analytical

Web analytics are a critical component of successful online marketing. Properly configured web analytics allow you to easily understand where your visitors came from, how long they stayed, whether they followed the intended navigation and “converted” or left without a trace. This insight then enables you to modify those pages that didn’t perform adequately, improve your visibility on referring sites that have proved valuable, adjust your online advertising campaigns and much more. Systematically measuring Return on Marketing Investment lets you improve on past marketing activities and justify your next campaign. An easy (free) way to get started is Google Analytics.

Be Integrated

Leads from your website are rarely ready for hand-off to your sales department. They need to be nurtured with a series of complementary activities. Capturing leads in a systematic fashion via a CRM or other defined process allows for prompt and context-rich follow-up that satisfies both the visitor (with additional information) and your sales department (looking for qualified leads).

Lather-Rinse-Repeat

Feedback from each of these ‘4 Bees’ can in turn be used to improve each aspect of online marketing. Deep customer insight has never been more important than in the online world. While many tools are available to help you along the way, the old adage “Know Your Customer” remains as powerful as ever.

Category: Expert Advice.
Industry: Technology, Services, Retail
Functional Area: Marketing
Tags: Google Analytics, Google Keyword Tool, keywords, marketing, Promotion, search engine optimization, search engines, SEO, web analytics, web traffic