As a business owner, you don’t have time to waste working with multiple online marketing firms to find the one that fits your online marketing goals and budget. When you hire an online marketing agency, you need to know that they will fulfill the contract efficiently, on budget and at or above your marketing expectations. Interviewing prospective online marketing service providers can be time consuming, and unless you know what questions to ask, it can be hard to determine a good fit.
With that in mind, our online marketing strategic planning team sat down and thought about the question asked most often and how we address them.
How do you build an effective and targeted online marketing strategy for your clients?
WHO
When researching options for a prospective client’s online marketing strategy, we take into account their target market as well as any prospective geo-targets that may be a factor, like state, county or region. First and foremost we need to know to whom we will be “speaking” with our content push to support the marketing goals.
WHERE
Once we delineate the target market, we find where they exist online, whether they are reading online publications or blogs, participating in online forums or social media pages or sites. It’s possible to do high-level research on who’s talking about what using tools like:
- Social Mention: “Receive free daily email alerts of your brand, company, CEO, marketing campaign, or on a developing news story, a competitor.”
- Google Trends: Search top keyword searches via Google’s powerful tools
Use these tools to find the conversations on your topic, industry, company or keyword selections, build profiles there and start sharing.
WHAT
What to share within your content push? Depending on the target market, where they live online and the options those sites offer, there are several different ways to join or start a conversation with your prospective clients. Budget can be a deciding factor in this scenario, so consider the costs of the following online marketing content options and select those that will get you’re the biggest online marketing bang for your buck:
- Banner and Text Ads
- Article Marketing
- Blogging
- Social Media Content like tweets, posts, videos and links
- Email Marketing
- Landing pages
WHEN
How often you share content can be just as integral to the success of your online marketing plan as what you share. We do significant competition analysis to see what the trends are in our prospect’s industry, which can help give us a solid view of how often to reach out with the online marketing content push.
These days, online marketing is an integral part of building a business. By understanding the questions to ask when researching the best online marketing company for your online marketing goals, you can save yourself a time-consuming step and ensure the best possible results for your online marketing campaign.