Do Your Own Marketing or Have It Done?
Business owners and managers face dozens of decisions every day, large and small. Here’s just one example: should you do your own online marketing, or engage the services of an outside agency?
If you are making such a choice, it helps to define the process of implementing online marketing first. Regardless of the medium, implementing an online marketing strategy often includes these steps:
- Define your marketing goals.
The goal of most online marketing efforts falls in one of a few areas:
attract visitors to your website, convert visitors to leads, and convert
leads to clients. Naturally you want to attract the best clients for
your business, and to generate revenue from those clients. One of the
factors you must consider is the return on your marketing investment per
client transaction.
- Investigate alternative online marketing strategies.
These can include email marketing campaigns, search engine advertising,
or creation, modification, or optimization of your website.
- Select and implement
up a strategy to achieve your goals.
- Measure your results
– website analytics, clickthroughs, conversions, phone number tracking,
landing pages, or whatever is appropriate for your strategy. Monitor
the effectiveness of your campaigns.
- Repeat! Your goals and strategies may remain the same, or you may find that you need to tweak your goals or your marketing. With online marketing, the landscape is always changing, so it’s important to stay up to date with changes to online marketing channels, tools, and trends.
Now how do you decide whether to do it yourself? Online marketing requires a mixture of tech savvy, media savvy, creativity, and charisma. You need media savvy to navigate what online marketing tools are available and select the best tool(s) for your purposes. You need technical skills to implement your solutions – build a website, set up your search engine ads, implement your email marketing program, etc. You or your staff may already have those skills and the necessary time to implement a successful online marketing effort.
Whether you do your own marketing or engage a partner, the important thing is to be sure that you are following a plan, and that your plan will achieve the business results you want. With so many strategies available, online marketing is a matter of learning about which strategy you are going to employ, implementing it, and keeping it going. Whether online marketing is already critical to your business, or remains an opportunity, contact World Source Tech to review your online marketing strategy.
Photo: Vivid Image
