Prioritizing Your Online Marketing Efforts

Are you thinking of ways to drive more traffic to your website? Or how best to interact with your customers and/or target market?

First off, you’re not alone. I talk with people every day that are looking to grow their businesses online, some of whom have a strong idea as to the strategies they’d like to employ, while others are looking for direction as to the best route to take.

Let’s use a fictitious example:

Say Wilbur works for a renowned company with a well-established brand and website. They’re currently engaging in encompassing search marketing initiatives in order to continuously build on their presence throughout the engines. They also have strong email and mobile marketing campaigns in place, and are serving ads throughout Google’s search and content network. Wilbur’s been tasked to find vendors capable of ramping up their display advertising campaign.

I talk with Wilbur and he gives me a breakdown of their current efforts, along with their objectives and digital marketing budget for the year. After doing some digging on my end, I find that their display advertising strategy is relatively sound and that they have optimal visibility in the right places. While doing research, I also find that there are a lot of people on the web talking about their brand and products, and not always positively, with no representation or moderation from their company.

Based on my analysis, I come back to Wilbur with a strategy for better managing these side conversations. I explain that while opportunities exist to enhance their display advertising efforts, it is my recommendation to shift priorities and allocate their budget toward online reputation management.

This type of situation is a common one. Businesses often times know what they’re looking for going in to a conversation regarding digital marketing, but after learning more about their current efforts and discovering where significant opportunities lie, it turns out that their resources would be much better served elsewhere.

It’s also not uncommon for companies to be dead on in the types of marketing initiatives they’re planning, in which case I help to formulate the best strategies around the specific engagements that they’re seeking.

There is a tendency, however, to try the newest thing out there, whether it’s social media marketing, mobile marketing, or better media placement targeting. The newest thing, though, isn’t always the best thing. Many times, the shortfalls of prior efforts turn companies off of a particular initiative that has the potential to generate significant gains.

Regardless of how sizeable your marketing budget is, it’s critical to understand all of the options that you have relative to building a stronger brand and online presence, and subsequently prioritizing that budget and your resources toward those that are right for your business.