whitepaper internet marketing overview

Copyright © LAMP-360 Jan 2013 Contact: www.lamp-360.com 020 3397 0725

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WHITEPAPER: INTERNET

MARKETING OVERVIEW January 1 2013

13 Steps to creation of an internet marketing strategy

BY JULIAN POULTER LAMP-360

WWW.LAMP-360.COM


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Whitepaper – Internet Marketing Explained

Contents

1. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY ....................................................................................... 3

2. YOUR WEBSITE ................................................................................................... 4

3. ANALYTICS .......................................................................................................... 5

4. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION ...................................................................... 5

5. CONTENT ............................................................................................................. 7

6. SOCIAL MEDIA ..................................................................................................... 8

7. LANDING PAGES AND MICRO SITES ................................................................ 8

8. E-COMMERCE ...................................................................................................... 9

9. CRM SYSTEMS & STRATEGY............................................................................. 9

10. EMAIL MARKETING ........................................................................................ 10

11. MARKETING AUTOMATION ........................................................................... 11

12. CONTENT MARKETING APPROACH ............................................................ 11

13. ADVERTISING PPC AND OTHER .................................................................. 12

14. INBOUND VS OUTBOUND ............................................................................. 13

15. SUMMARY ....................................................................................................... 13

16. FURTHER INFORMATION .............................................................................. 15

17. ABOUT LAMP-360 .......................................................................................... 15


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1. Internet Marketing Introduction

The internet is a wonderful thing but there are now so many technologies, products and techniques in the market that it has become confusing for the non-internet professional to fully understand it and more importantly how to exploit its undoubted potential.

This paper is certainly not a get rich quick guide or even a detailed how to guide but is designed to explain the key elements of an internet marketing strategy, and importantly how they all fit together to give you the solution you require – normally to increase your visitors, leads, sales or bottom line.

This paper is intended for senior executives in small and medium businesses, who do not have time to track all of the internet technologies and strategies and wish to obtain an overview. The story is told in a logical manner starting with your existing web site – what do I do with it?

2. Executive Summary

Internet Marketing (IM) is generally about lead generation or if you have an e-commerce capability (you sell online) that it can be about revenue generation itself. IM is just one segment of the overall marketing pie, however for many businesses these days, it is the only marketing that they do or find effective, so it is of importance to nearly all growing businesses.

Everybody has heard of the power of the internet and the rise of organisations like Google, Twitter and Facebook. Millions of companies have embraced certain concepts of the internet marketing such as advertising on Google Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC) using its AdWords offering.

Many companies use Google AdWords for instance, but there another dozen out there who are trying to decide if they should be using Facebook or Twitter.

The diagram below shows how all the IM elements fit together.


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In order to obtain the best return on investment, the key measure of marketing or sales success, then a strategy, however simple needs to be put together. This strategy, as this paper shows, will include potentially many different elements.

This paper gives an introduction to each of these topics, and hopefully and importantly, how they fit together. Within each topic it also includes a short list of suggested actions and provides links to other resources including a led generation planning template.

3. Your Website

The web site is normally at the heart of any on-going marketing strategy, so dealing with your web site, its content and it being found are very important.

Web sites have been a common part of a business’s marketing strategy for many years now. The first generation sites were characterised as simple shop windows providing basic information about a company and its products and services. 2nd generation sites improved interaction and added e-commerce. This was improved with the addition of so called Web 2.0 features such polls, pod casts and videos. More sophisticated sites included personalisation of the user experience and encourage much more interaction.

More recently social networking and blogs, rich interactive features and advanced customisation have become available and the tools to enable these have become more and more affordable and manageable so that even small businesses can have a professional and creative web site.

However, given that the majority of web sites are there to be found and to generate leads for the company, the look and feel and experience of the web site is now often secondary to the issues of being found on the internet, though a web site is usually at the heart of an internet marketing strategy, as you will see.

There are many ways to manage a web site these days. You will often start with buying a domain name and usually this company will provide some sort of hosting package, usually for around $100 per annum. These packages will often come with a “site builder” that will enable you to add pages to the site and generally manage it, for instance setting up emails. In addition many will allow you to easily add functionality such as shopping carts or blogs.

The next step up and one to consider for any established business is to use a Content Management System to look after the web site. These can be purchased, rented or obtained open source. Most hosting packages will allow you to easily install a CMS such as Drupal or Joomla. In simple terms they allow a professional template (many are available free and more sophisticated versions for a small charge) to be used and provide all the facilities to manage a sophisticated web site.

You will have heard of Hypertext Mark-up Language (HTML), this is what web browsers such as Internet Explorer, Chrome or Firefox use to render pages on your PC.

Much web development can be undertaken without an html editor but often this will be useful to have as well. Common professional editors include Adobe Dreamweaver and the ubiquitous Photoshop.

Page layouts and templates may often be developed in an external HTML editor such as these and then loaded into the CMS web pages or articles along with support for blogs, images, administration and user registration. The CMS will also have some form of HTML editor included, which may be adequate.

Actions:

Obtain your domain name including variants such as .com or .org


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Obtain hosting package and CMS

Create web content pages in your CMS and publish your site

4. Analytics

In order to assess the efficacy of a web site and the improvements required when embarking on an IM programme, the performance of the web site is important.

Many specific analytical products exist to provide a plethora of statistics on a web site. A few years ago however, Google provided a fairly comprehensive analytical toolset – Google Analytics – completely free. This has now become the de-facto standard for analytics and is a sophisticated offering, sufficient for the majority of companies. As it’s free, it’s also a very good starting point.

Any web site should install Google Analytics on to their site to receive the statistics, freely available, Google provides many metrics broken down into the following main categories:

Intelligence

Visitors

Traffic sources

Content

Goals

Content Management System

Whenever you are about to embark on a web site improvement programme, it’s a good idea to have the analytics available to show the current performance in terms of the number of visitors and conversions.

Most web sites are designed to make visitors purchase or ideally some other call to action (CTA) such as making a phone call, or becoming a lead, normally by completing a registration form.

Firstly, it’s a good idea to ensure that each relevant page has clear content and a call to action. For instance downloading a whitepaper could be the CTA and the visitor has to register to obtain it.

There is debate between freely available content and that which is good enough to be registered or even paid for…. but that is beyond the scope of this paper.

Secondly. in your analytics program, like Google, you can set up conversion tracking. That is which visitors convert to become a lead or customer. They trigger a ‘conversion’ by reaching a page which may be the checkout completion or a “Thanks of downloading” page.

Action:

Set up Google Webmaster account and site analytics

Track your web stats over time using default reports

Set up conversion tracking

5. Search Engine Optimisation

Assuming that you have a web site you probably want it to be found. If you just publish your web site and do not promote it, expect zero traffic i.e. visitors to your site.


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These days that means being found by one of the search engines. The 3 main commercial search engines are Google, Yahoo and Bing. Yahoo results are now provided by Bing, so you really only need to consider Google and Bing.

In order to be found there is an art call Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), which means setting up your website so it is found and ideally appears on the first page of the search engine results. Clearly in some competitive industries this is not achievable.

Studies show that 80% of searchers do not look beyond the first page of results! It is trying to set up your web site so that it looks good to the search engines’ ‘spiders’ that crawl the web looking at every web site and page. The algorithm that Google (or Bing) uses to rank pages changes regularly.

Many companies exist who offer specialist SEO services and like many things it’s easy to get SEO 80% right, the remaining 20% is hard and an external provider should be considered if you need this last 20%. They will keep on top of new trends and the Google algorithm changes.

In order to optimise a web site to obtain higher rankings, ideally page one, there are three main strategies that can be employed, by any business, these are described below:

1. On site / page features

Several years ago managing the so called on page features was mostly what SEO was about. Ensuring the pages were laid out correctly and the “meta tags “ were set up was all that was required.

The importance of the meta tags and on page features is now much less important than it was, but it is still sensible to pay attention to this.

There are many aspects to on site and page optimization including:

Meta Tags – these appear in the “header” section of an html web page. There are several tags used commonly:

Title: “About Us”

Description: “XYZ Company are well known for their abc service…..”

Keywords: “xyz, abc service, abc”

Keywords are the words or short phrases that describe your service “lead generation”, “plumber”. There is a science around keywords and obviously popular words like “insurance” or “cancer” are very popular and make it hard for your web site to be found when these terms are searched for. However, multi word phrases like “Chelsea boiler specialist” is much more specific. On the one hand, less people will search for this, but if they do and find your site, it is likely to be much more relevant. Spending time determining and researching keywords is important.

Where these chosen Keywords are most important however, is within the text on the pages of your site itself. Each page on your site should be giving a specific message about your company, product or service, and there will be several keywords relevant to that. These keywords should be used sensibly on the page, usually multiple times.

Attempts to stuff a page with keywords is usually seen as spamming by the search engines and may result in poorer rankings.

2. External “Back” Links

In the Google search engine world, one of its key methods of determining a ranking is the popularity of a site. This popularity is partly determined by the number of other sites that link to it, because it provides interesting or authoritative content. Even better is if one high ranking


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site links to another. The opposite of that is creating a link to a web site from your personal profile on Facebook that is very low interest will have little value.

For these reasons one of the main aspects of an SEO service today is to generate links into your site from other sites – so called back links.

So a link building strategy is important but it is hard work and can only be attempted over time. The best links are from other proper bone fide web sites and you need a strategy to encourage sites to link to yours – content is important. There was until recently “link farms” which would sell you a link for a few dollars, however, Google frowns on this service and they are not to be recommended. Genuine business directories can be “ok”.

3. Content (is King)

Perhaps the most important element is to generate fresh and interesting content for your site – a challenge for many companies. See the section below for more details on Content.

Tools

Finally, there are plenty of tools around that can help you with tasks of optimising your web site, such as “Web CEO” and others. They will analyse your site and give you a list of tasks to optimise pages and help you manage the process of choosing keywords, reviewing your competition etc etc.

Action:

Determine, research and refine your keywords

Ensure the meta-tags are set on the pages

Consider use of and SEO tool or external company

6. Content

In order to attract visitors to a site, as well as having a good proposition / service you need to write engaging, fresh and interesting content. Good quality content will encourage users to read more of your site and also will allow you to use it to help create other online communities, perhaps using social media. It can also be used for other communications such as email.

As well as writing for your web pages other types of content to consider include:

Blogs (informal and internal news), white papers, Tweets, video (YouTube), audio and Podcasts, news (external and internal)

Best practice suggest that up to 30% of marketing spend should be used on content creation. Some company’s marketing departments end up looking like a news room or video production studio as they produce so much content.

Some or most content will obviously be produced internally however some items such as non-technical blog articles or news stories can be contracted out to professional organisations or free lancers. Technical writers may also be able to write competent whitepapers.

The content should exist on your web site in a format for consumers, normally pdf, but it’s also a good idea to put papers on the site in html form, so the search engines can read it. A good idea may be to drip feed a 10 page whitepaper, out on a blog 1 section at a time, week by week?

Action:

Plan and start writing content on a regular basis


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Ensure your content is on your web site and distributed widely using social media and other sites

7. Social media

One of the major trends of the last few years has been the inexorable rise of social media. These leading players are now household names and include Facebook(FB), LinkedIn (LI) which is mainly business, Twitter and more recently Pinterest.

All these sites help build communities of people interested in many things. The attraction to a business is that especially on Facebook, users spend a lot of time interacting with ‘friends’ and often interesting topics and messages can go viral, which means they spread rapidly around the world. A business can use these communities to promote themselves in a variety of ways – blogging, commenting, messaging and advertising. Quality content promoting through leadership should be used as promotional material will be perceived as spam.

Social media can be used to generate large volumes of incoming traffic to a web site quickly along with email and PPC and can be a useful tool in the marketers’ armoury – it can work for B2C as well as B2B.

With FB now approaching 800 million users, there is now a competitor to Google Adwords (as well as Bing). FB allows you to target their users. However, recent studies have shown the click through rates to be lower on FB than on Google.

Both FB and LI allow you to create Pages which can be used for all sorts of topics, but normally you should set up a company page using these tools. You can describe your products and services and are more suitable for use by a company than the normal social page.

Most social sites are getting very visual with the use of pictures and videos (see Facebook Timeline), this means thinking about your company in a visual way, not normal behaviour for a services company, for instance.

Companies should plan to start to attract Followers on Twitter and Friends on Facebook and Connections on LinkedIn.

As new content is created or issues arise, these can be published to these social sites. In addition any web site page or email communication should have the social media buttons embedded so that users can Share the content to their social friends.

The number of people who will re post or re-Tweet your articles and news depends on its interest and topicality level, it will usually be very low but some people have 100s or 1000s of contacts and your message will spread to a much wider audience, through use of social media.

Action:

Set up social pages and accounts

Publish content on social sites

Consider pictures and videos – get visual

8. Landing Pages and Micro Sites

We have discussed the relative importance of the website in an overall IM strategy. However, there are two more considerations.

As part of an overall lead generation strategy a company will undoubtedly have regular marketing campaigns. Topics such as product launches are obvious examples.


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A launch campaign may incorporate many marketing elements from press releases, events to obviously updating the web site. However, rather than updating the main (legacy) web site there may be a case for creating specific landing pages on the main site or a dedicated microsite if the topic is large enough.

Cases where a MicroSite may be useful

Legacy site, urgent requirement

Large conglomerate with many brands

Product categories

A complex site required that does not easily fit within existing site structure or technology.

The main goal of both a Landing Page and a Micro Site is a “conversion” – this may be to encourage visitors to call a phone a number, chat, register details or buy a product or service online. The messaging and calls to action must be carefully thought through to aid the conversion process.

Many email marketing tools today build in the creation of a Landing Page as part of a campaign.

Action:

Drive all incoming traffic to relevant Landing Pages

Consider developing a Landing Page for each of your key value propositions

9. E-Commerce

The act of selling something over the web involves an e-commerce system. This system allows the list of products to be loaded, either manually or where numbers are large, from another file or database, including SKUs, images, descriptions, weights, dimensions etc.

The visitor then navigates through a product catalogue putting items into a shopping cart or Basket. When the visitor is ready he is passed to the “Checkout”. At this point the user eventually is passed to a Payment Gateway where the credit card details are taken.

Integration with PayPal is now very easy and with the addition of “Pro” account any user can take online payments.

More sophisticated sites will use a proper e-commerce package and many popular CMS will include or be integrated with e-commerce packages.

Site such as eBay now make more money and transactions from regular shops or online shops using their Portal as a shop. It is very easy and cheap to set up your own online shop in eBay.

Action:

Review eBay shops

Review shopping cart functionality

10. CRM systems & strategy

CRM = Customer Relationship Management (system) and refers to a group of systems that deal with the sales and sometimes marketing process. Well know products include Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics, Sugar which is open course (free) and our own LAMP-360 system.


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For many web sites one of the main aims is to collect prospect and or customer data. As a bare minimum an email address is often captured so that future contact can be maintained. Sometimes just a name and in many cases much more – for instance obtaining an insurance quote.

Depending on volumes, a lot of data could be captured, and this needs to be stored in some sort of data base. The most elementary web sites may provide forms that submit emails to the webmaster, however this usually means a manual update of a database.

Nearly all commercial web sites provide a mechanism to do this. A CRM system will allow you to design a form that when filled in will create a new record in your CRM system – this lead can be followed up automatically (an auto-responder email) or manually, usually by part of your sales or customer service function.

This form can be embedded into your site or a link put on your site will allow you to capture leads in a structured way and allocate them to the appropriate department/user and contact strategy in sales or marketing.

CRM can be used by your sales team to keep track of all their prospects and communications with them. It is also ideally used my marketing to record all leads and help generate those leads.

Action:

Review LAMP-360 or other CRM systems

Define your lead generation workflows

11. Email marketing

It’s important to continually build up your list of email contacts, as email marketing can be effective and is relatively cheap. You will already have email and contacts addresses for your customers and should obtain these for your prospect and put them in the CRM or marketing system. Use your web sites, coupons, adverts, email signatures and any other medium to obtain email addresses.

Once you have collected, and are collecting a database of emails, and hopefully some basic data to analyse the segmentation and demographics of your customers, you can now do something with it. What ? Well consider email marketing…..

Email has become the bane of modern life and with its constant interruptions – contact me if you want to know how to set it up so that you only receive email twice a day – a great time saver.

However, email is a pro-active method of sending out your message or offer and its related call to action as part of a campaign. Email can be good way to educate and inform prospects and customers about your company and its offers. It can be used to keep customers informed and to encourage them to buy better, additional or alternative products – so called cross-selling or up-selling.

The ideal list should be opted in, and are people who want to receive communication from you. However, bought in email lists still work well, though the conversion metrics are lower.

All emails should be well written and there are arguments about using a plain format or branded templates, which to some extent depend on your audience demographic, industry and the status of your relationship with them.

In addition each email should:

1. Have an unsubscribe link clearly visible as well as your details.


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2. The message should be relevant to the recipient 3. Provide Share options to post to the recipients’ social media accounts 4. A Clear call to action (CTA) which directs the user back to a dedicated Landing Page

on your web site.

Action:

Collect email addresses aggressively through all channels available

Design campaigns to go to any new contacts

12. Marketing Automation

Many task in the generation and development of leads can be automated to increase the effort involved of sales people using standard email templates. These templates can be organised into streams of communication.

A simple examples is, a lead registers on the web site and is sent a series of emails relating to the topic of interest.

Rather than stop with one or two quick emails this prospect can be nurtured over time, including calls by tele-marketing to help qualify them and establish a relationship.

Sophisticated system and processes will take account of the actions the visitor takes and which stage they are at in their “buying cycle”.

See our whitepaper LAMP: B2B Lead Generation for full details on this approach.

Action:

Look at which processes can be automated, particularly with regard to lead generation and lead nurturing

Review marketing automation systems such as www.lamp-360.com

13. Content marketing approach

Content marketing is essentially the use of quality content, in conjunction with marketing automation to engage and develop relationships with leads and move them to customers. See section 6 on content.

As content needs to be distributed in a controlled manner and reported upon, an automation tool can help here.

Content needs to be tailored to different types of buyers and where they are in the buying cycle. Are they currently “unaware” of your proposition or already “looking at solutions”. In each case the type of content they would wish to receive is likely to be different.

http://www.lamp-360.com/resources/whitepapers.html


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A marketing automation tool will allow these communications with buyers to be set up and also scored and distribute leads in your organisation and provide the tools to tele-marketing and sales to follow up these leads.

The diagram below shows a simple content marketing approach using collateral such as whitepapers in conjunction with tele-marketing:

Actions

Develop a content strategy

Consider using marketing automation tools like www.lamp-360.com to help automate this process

14. Advertising PPC and other

One of the final pieces of the IM jigsaw is advertising on the internet.

Google AdWords is the best of breed when it comes to Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising. However, alternatives are available with Bing and also now in social media such as Facebook and LinkedIn.

The PPC model is one where the advertiser only pays when a user clicks on their advertisement. The ad is matched to appropriate content or to the specific keywords that a user types in when doing a search with one of the search engines. PPC has some significant advantages over other forms of online advertising. Here is our “Top 5” list for why we like PPC and AdWords in particular: 1) Small initial investment. With no setup fees or minimum monthly spend; even the smallest companies can get started right away

http://www.lamp-360.com/


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2) Immediate results. You get immediate access to millions of viewers all over the world. With Google’s dominance in search engine market share they have the most potential in generating customers right away 3) Highly Targeted Ads. You determine which keywords to target so you can be highly selective to just the right customers at the right part of the buying cycle to your products and business 4) Total control of your budget. As your business changes you can expand or constrain your PPC ad spend to meet your dynamic business needs 5) The Power of Analytics. With the added tracking and reporting available with Google Analytics, you can track the success and failure of each and every keyword. With this info it becomes easy to cut the losers and double down on the winners

Action: Set up a test campaign on Adwords

Set a small initial budget, say $150 per month. Test & review.

15. Inbound vs outbound

Some marketers group marketing into inbound and outbound categories and the IM components we have discussed generally fall into one of these categories:

Outbound: Email, Social media

Inbound: Adwords, SEO, social media, whitepapers & content, Landing Pages and MicroSites

In addition there are back office functions: analytics, CRM, marketing automation.

From a marketers perspective a typical IM strategy will encompass elements from both inbound and outbound. Typically the inbound approaches are cheaper, at least initially.

16. Summary

In section 3 we showed a graphic of the overall components of IM. Looking at this from another viewpoint, we show the process diagram from the point of view of sales and lead development below that combines many of these elements:


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Not shown on this diagram are the back end systems such as CMS, marketing automation and CRM or e-commerce.

Leads come into the sales funnel from a variety of routes – web site, email, AdWords. These are nurtured and developed using automated campaigns with content. The lead moves through discrete steps: register, demo, trial and eventually customer.

Many leads drop into longer term lead nurturing campaigns.

Some of the key lessons are:

At the heart of IM is your web site, correctly optimized

To generate interest in your web site you create great content in the form of pages, blog articles and whitepapers. Consider video if possible

Landing Pages designed for conversion exist for each of your propositions

The content is distributed widely across the internet using email, social media and all content links back to your web sites Landing Pages

Conversions create leads in your CRM system to be followed up by automated campaigns and sales

Additional advertising can be considered such as Adwords

Actions:

Start simple and build up the components of the programme gradually

Plan long term with an integrated strategy

IM needs regular on-going commitment, review and optimisation


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Consider outsourcing key parts of the process

17. Further information

If you wish to find out more you may be interested in our full more detailed whitepaper: Internet Marketing Explained.

Additional resources are also available here over on our web site including a slideshow version of this paper, including more diagrams that build through the process. .

18. About LAMP-360 LAMP-360 was initially an offshoot of a services company founded in the UK in 2003. This company (called Selling People "SP") specialized in providing outsourced sales and lead generation solutions for companies. Typically these were software companies from Australia, India and the USA wanting to set up in the UK. SP provided the support for these companies to obtain early footprint in the UK and EU in the form of offices, marketing, leads and then closing initial sales deals for them. A key part of this process was generating leads, to be passed on to the (outsourced) sales team.

As a result we have significant experience of lead generation for SMEs. We therefore designed a best practice process to support this: LAMP-360.

LAMP is an "Out of the box" lead generation and lead development process, supported by technology, for SMEs

“Out of the box” means it is already almost fully configured and only needs the input of certain content and template modification to get your first campaigns out. However, LAMP is about the process of generating leads and sales not about sending emails, and the process guides you through this.

LAMP-360

Unit 12, The Power House

Higham Mead

Chesham

Buckinghamshire

HP5 2AH

Phone: 020 3397 0725

Email: [email protected]

Web site: www.lamp-360.com

http://www.lamp-360.com/resources/whitepapers.html

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