Do Not Start Marketing Until You Answer These Questions

When it comes to online marketing, the sky is the limit.  We’re talking:

• SEO / SEM
• PPC / Ad management
• Social media
• Email marketing
• Content marketing
• In-bound marketing
• Influencers
• Brand penetration
• Integrated marketing
• …[insert tomorrow’s marketing buzzword here!]

At the end of the day, however, online marketing efforts boil down to a few key business goals, and it is these business goals that we focus on at the start of any project.  In fact, we start our online marketing projects with a fairly extensive set of questions that we discuss with our clients.  As of this rambling, we are up to 43 questions in our questionnaire (yikes – need to whittle that down!), but here are the most important questions that we really try and force, er… encourage, our clients to answer.  Without these answers, we cannot provide the best service!

So here goes.  Ready to start your online marketing?  Make sure you can answer the following:

1. What are the primary business goals for your online presence (E.g. branding/identity reinforcement, improved access to information, audience communications, sales, etc.)?
2. Who are your competitors and what makes you different?
3. Who are we talking to? Is there a specific target audience associated with your organization? Please be as specific as possible – demographics, location, behavior, tech savviness, etc.
4. Why would this audience want to talk to you?
5. What is the value of these visitors?  (Not sure what that means?  This might help! ) 
6. What is the most important action you want these visitors to your site to complete? This must be specific, measurable and realistic (E.g. download a white paper, join, buy something, search a database, etc.)  These are your conversion goals!
7. What OFFLINE marketing tactics are you currently using or considering? 
8. What are your internal resources for your marketing efforts?  Specifically, who generates content for your website and marketing efforts now?
9. What is your marketing budget – both online and offline?
10. And finally, and most importantly, what outcome will make this project successful? How will you measure success?

Serious questions, right??  We never said this would be easy!  But it really is important to answer these questions before starting an SEO program, social media outreach, email communications, or any other online marketing tactics.

So sit down.  Dig into the questions above. And then call your friendly Ironistic staff to take your website to the next level!