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Formulating An Internet Marketing Plan
As I mentioned last time, a common mistake with internet marketing is to have a website built or make changes to your existing site, without having a plan for how you are going to promote it.
The starting point in any plan should be to establish some financial targets.
Calculating your cost per enquiry
Say, for example, you typically make £120 commission per booking, you need to ensure that the cost of bringing in each booking is less than this. In reality you will have other overheads to cover and of course need to make a profit, so it may be that you can only afford to spend £60 per booking on marketing. Not every enquiry will lead to a booking, it may only be 1 in 10, in which case your targeted cost per enquiry will be £6.
Of course you can use these figures to assess all your marketing activity. For example, if your high street shop costs £20,000 a year to operate, you would need nearly 3,500 people to walk through the door to give you a ‘cost per enquiry’ of £6. Similarly, if you are a call centre spending £5k on press advertising, you need to generate over 800 calls from that advertising to generate enquiries for £6.
Clearly each business will have a different financial model, particularly those who operate in different sectors. For example, long haul and cruise specialists will earn more commission than those selling short haul beach holidays and consequently can afford to pay more per booking.
The most difficult aspect of working out what enquiries from each type of marketing activity are costing to generate, is when you promote your business in a variety of ways.
For example, a press ad could have led someone to walk through your high street front door, whilst putting your domain name on the ad will almost certainly drive traffic to your website. If you measure the cost effectiveness of the press ad on phone calls alone, you will be overstating the cost per enquiry from press adverting, whereas your internet enquiries and shop footfall cost per enquiry figures will benefit from the press advertising and look lower than they actually are.
The key is to establish a cost per enquiry for your business as a whole and then try as best you can to do this for each type of marketing activity you use. Where you can you should try and establish how the customer first heard of you, either by having a field on your website enquiry form or by asking your call centre and/or shop staff to ask the question when taking enquiries.
So, having done some calculations you know what you want to pay for each enquiry and are probably already marketing your business in a number of ways offline. So what’s the next step?
Initial thoughts about your website
Clearly, as a starting you need to have a website which conveys the right messages about what you offer and which generates enquiries from the people who visit the site.
If you need to generate enquires for £6 and only 1 in 10 site visitors phone you up or fill out an enquiry form, you need to generate each site visit for 60p.
When deciding on a look for your website, there is often a conflict between what looks good and what is useful if you are trying to be ranked highly on the search engines.
We will talk about website design issues next time and how to have a site which converts visits to enquires at the highest possible rate, but the key decision to make before considering the design is how you are going to promote the site.
Promoting your site offline
The starting point is of course to promote your website via all your offline marketing activities, such as by including the domain name on your shop signage and in all your stationery, email signatures, press advertising, teletext advertising and any other way you promote your business.
The next step is to consider how you will promote your business online.
Promoting your site online
In the main, the objective of all your internet marketing activity will be to encourage people to visit your website, although there are increasingly options to advertise and have people call you without visiting your website and we will discuss these in a future article.
The main methods for promoting your website online include natural search, pay per click, email marketing, affiliate marketing and online display advertising.
You may have heard the term ‘search marketing’ which is basically the use of search engines to drive traffic to your site. This is either via natural search or pay per click.
Natural search is where you aim to rank as highly on the search engines as possible when people use them to search for a product or service that you offer. These results generally appear on the left hand side of the results page that appears following a search query.
Pay per click is when you set up ads on a search engine and make bids for those ads to be displayed against certain search terms. These ads are displayed on the right hand side of the page, with a few ads also appearing at the top of the natural search results. When someone clicks on an ad you pay the search engine for that click.
Whilst natural search and pay per click are the main ways that people seek to promote their website, there are other ways of doing so.
Email marketing involves sending out emails to people who you have a relationship with, such as current customers or previous enquirers, or to people whose email addresses you acquire from third parties. This is often a cost effective marketing option but one that needs to be well thought out due to the amount of spamming that goes on these days.
Affiliate marketing is when you offer incentives to the publishers of other websites to promote your business, rewarding them when the traffic they send to your site results in a sale.
Online display advertising is when you use graphical banner ads to promote your website. This type of advertising usually involves paying a fixed fee for a period of time or paying for every 1000 page impressions that your ad appears on.
Whilst all of these internet marketing elements can be used by almost any business, typically most businesses start by launching a website and seeking to promote it via search marketing (natural search and/or pay per click).
The key decision in respect of search marketing is whether you prefer to rely on natural search, which can take some time to bear fruit, or are prepared to invest in the more instantaneous pay per click option.
We’ll look at each of the internet marketing elements in more detail over the coming weeks and next time we’ll look at website design and development.
Tim Harding
www.reallyusefulwebsites.co.uk
Tim Harding wrote this article for Travel Trade Gazzette, the leading travel industry trade publication.
Tim Harding is Managing Director of Really Useful Websites Limited, an internet marketing company. Prior to launching Really Useful Websites Tim was Marketing Director at NCL and Senior Marketing Manager at Airtours Holidays.
