VPSwebhost
- New Year, New Plan – Update Your E-Marketing Plan
It’s that
time of year. The TV overflows with ads designed to motivate you to
be the best you, better foods, better cloths, better cleaning
supplies, … better salads?
And it’s
great to get introspective and think about the changes we all,
individually, want to make. We want to be better, healthier, more
successful. We know it can be done, the building blocks accessible.
As you go
through these thoughts, take some time to examine your online
marketing planning in the same light.
How can you
be better, do more and see more success.
The obvious
starting points still exist: understanding what people search for,
knowing the best practices of SEO, etc.
But how are
you with integrating different marketing efforts? Does your social
media plan take cues from your search analytics? Is your email
program taking insights from your conversion optimization work? Are
you using psycho-graphics to help understand why people take the
actions they do? Is your SEO work blending with user experience
testing?
Today’s
online landscape requires a much more advanced approach to grow
success and sustain it. The days of onetrick-pony-SEO-only success
are behind us. If you’you've missed that memo, it’s time to catch up.
For years,
successful websites have approached their online business with a
dedicated plan. They’ve put resources in place to accomplish the
goals and they've worked to make it happen. Some have taken
shortcuts, and almost all have found any early successes reversed.
Shortcuts don’t work, plain and simple.
Tools can
help gather data and point to opportunities, but tools cannot build
your plan. Tools can track results, but can also waste time. So many
people spend way too much time looking at too much detail. If
searchers seek content (answers to their questions), should you spend
the next 4 hours looking through reports or creating content? The
answer is it’s a balance. You need data to help make decisions, but
sometimes you can get so caught up following thread sin data that you
lose time needed to create unique, compelling content.
Last year I
was listening to a guy talk about how much success he’s had with
his new website. He said he didn’t understand what the problem was.
He simply paid a service to create content for him (spending $60 -
$75/week, he claimed). All that fresh, unique content was, he
claimed, ranking well and driving increases in traffic in excess of
100% week on week. He’d been live for 2 months and said he didn’t
get why so many people struggled.
I was
curious, so I asked him what his traffic volume looked like at that
point. He said he was seeing more than 1,000 visits per month. Which
immediately explained why he was excited about his “more than 100%
growth” pattern. Going from 10 visits to 100 visits is a massive
jump percentage wise, yet wouldn’t really be considered success by
most businesses today.
My next
question was around rankings and keywords. He explained he “owned
the long tail” and expected to begin ranking well for head queries
shortly.
Which
brought me to the ultimate key performance indicator (KPI) –
revenue. He was, after all, trying to sell products. He explained
that revenue should be expected to grow slowly as people need to
learn to trust his site. Hmmm…? Really? Does this mean you see a
lot of return visitors? No, he said, 95% of his visitors were new.
It’s
obvious to anyone reading this that this is not going to be a story
with a happy ending.
Several
months after we first talked, I met this same gent at a different
conference. He was struggling to understand why his site failed to
generate any real money. Why rankings were non-existent and why he
never saw traffic from head queries. He refused to believe his
content was faulty. Even after he was shown how his content was
simply copied from other locations (or his content had been copied to
other locations), he refused to believe his shortcut (buying “unique”
content) was a dead end.
For most
businesses, the New Year marks a new fiscal year as well. Now is the
time to figure out where your plans are in need of support. Now is
the time to learn which areas you need more education in. Now is the
time to review programs to see if they can support each other.
Smaller
businesses can often cross support between programs easier than
larger companies. The downside is smaller businesses with that
flexibility (due to fewer people to keep looped) often lack the
people to do all this work. Again, it comes down to balance.
Take a long
hard look at each area you should invest time in. Put it down on
paper and determine how much time you think you should be investing
in each area. Then track things for one or two weeks to see how much
time you’re actually investing I each area.
New Year?
Time for a new plan. If you want more success, doing the same things
as you have in the past often won’t help you make the leap. You
need new ideas, new approaches and a new plan.
Duane
Forrester
Sr. Product Manager
Bing
Sr. Product Manager
Bing
Source
http://www.bing.com/blogs/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2014/01/09/new-year-new-plan-update-your-e-marketing-plan.aspx
