Online marketing

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Definition and tips provided by:

Jane Puddicombe

Online marketing is, quite simply, the act of getting your message across using the internet or email.

Unlike TV, Billboard, Cold calling and other forms of traditional direct marketing, the internet consumer usually shows an interest in your product or service by searching for it, thus qualifying themselves an a potential customer. In this manner you can concentrate your marketing efforts (and budget) on the hottest prospects and not spend time and money on a less targeted "scattergun" approach.

Expert's top tips:

Online marketing - Before you start

There are many avenues to explore when planning your online marketing campaign. Just like any other campaign the best place to start is with a strategy – and every good strategy involves research. Before setting up a pay per click (PPC) campaign, engaging in Search engine optimisation (SEO) or even changing your website I suggest examining the following to form the basis of a solid online campaign

1. Keyword or Key phrase Research
These are words or phrases potential customers potential customers are typing in to a search engine to find your product or service. For example on this site the key words would be "women networking", "women networking online" "women business support"
Begin by brainstorming – what would you or your colleagues type in. Also ask friends and family what they might put in to a search engine to find you? A layman’s term is often an overlooked and profitable keyword.
A good tool to use is wordtracker – for a small fee this tool will tell you how many searches have been performed on each key phrase by search engine by month.
You will need a list of these phrases, both popular and "niche" as this will form the basis of your online campaigns.

2. Competitor Analysis
What are your competitors doing online. Are they paying for advertising (PPC) are they coming up in the natural search listings on main keywords or key phrases? Have they spent a lot of money on their site? How many competitors do you have online – You may have more competition online than offline.
The answers to these questions will help you to estimate a budget for entering the market space or increasing your online market share.

3. PPC (Pay Per Click)
The paid listings come up top and right on Google by a "sponsored link" title. On Yahoo they appear top and bottom.
Each time the ad is clicked on the advertiser is charged. Depending on the competitiveness of the phrase the cost can be form 2p per click to £25 and beyond – yes, for just one click! (Highly competitive areas where the click price is high include pharmaceuticals, gambling, slimming, vice sites, travel, financial products, high end recruitment and seasonally some retail sectors)
You can find out the cost of a click via Google Adwords by setting up a PPC campaign without putting it live. This will help you to estimate a budget or even to see if PPC is a viable option (It isn’t for everyone)

4. SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)
When researching SEO look at the sites that come up top on the natural listings for your main keywords. Look at the top blue bar (the explorers bar) on the pages that come up top. Do they contain the phrase you have searched on? Does the page contain the phrase – how many times?
If the page has the phrase a few times weaved into the copy and the blue bar has the phrase in the page has been "optimised" for the search engines.
This means it would be worth learning how to optimise your own pages to compete for natural listings.

5. Inbound Links
The search engines have complicated algorithms governing the order of listings; the main things they look for, however, are optimised page copy (see above) and inbound links.
Inbound links show how many sites have a link pointing to your site (links pointing out from your site are fairly irrelevant) You can find out how many links your competitors have pointing to them by typing link:www.competitorwebsite.com into Google. This will give you an idea of how many links you would need to compete in the natural listings.
(Note: all links are not equal – but that is a whole other article)

What Next?
When you have researched the info above you should have a feel for how much time and effort will be involved in marketing online. If your competitors are marketing aggressively then they are probably doing well – signifying a healthy online market in your sector. It may also suggest a high cost to entering that market.
If you have few online competitors you will have a relatively low cost to become top of your field online. However there may not be much interest yet from your customers.

Once you have the information you are in an excellent position to move forward with you online marketing strategy. Hopefully the act or researching your competitors will have given you many ideas of what to do (and what to avoid!) There are many resources online to make researching your competitors easier. The following are a few of my favourites:

toolbar.google.com – Lets you download a Google toolbar which gives every site a mark out of 10 (known as the page rank PR) The score is based on mainly inbound links and the PR of those links. Note – this is also known as "spyware"

www.wordtracker.com – As mentioned shows the number of searches on a list of key phrases – and has a free trial!

www.seochat.com - a good site for everything SEO. Also some great tools.

www.archive.org - The "Way Back Machine" allows you to look at how your competitors' sites have changed and how often they upgrade them.