This post offers you the questions that are useful to consider when figuring out your own Internet marketing strategy. Answer these honestly and thoroughly (indeed if you’re not going to bother doing that, you’d be better off not wasting your time), write your answers down in detail and you will then understand more about what is likely to work for you, for your customers and for your business. Go for it!
1. What do you want for your business?
2. Who are your customers? (i.e. small businesses, homeowners, woman, men, older people, young adults, a specific sector)
3. And where are they – geographically?
4. Where do they look for what you sell? Online searches, online directories, shops, town, magazines, free papers?
5. Right now – how do your customers know about you?
6. Why do they buy from you?
7. Why should new customers buy from you?
8. What do you have that they need?
9. How do you tell customers about all this?
10. What exactly do you want customers/visitors to do when they get to your website?
11. How do you find your customers?
12. How do you find their websites? Have a go and see what happens, and what you have to do in order to find them.
13. Your ideal customers – prepare a spreadsheet for this, I suggest, and if you’re happy working with one. What are their websites like? What are they doing right? What are they getting wrong? Do you think they “get” the web?
14. Your competitors – again, some form of spreadsheet may be helpful with this. And the same questions – what is good about their websites, what is bad, and what is just plain ugly?
15. Try a search for what you do/sell/offer. Write down all the words and phrases that you use for this. What are the results? Explore this some – surf!
16. And then just spend some time, after all the above, looking around the web, making notes on what you think is good, what is working, and what is missing. What would you love to see on the web, what would your customer like to find?
Now – bring all of the above together and see what comes out of it. If you want some guidance and ideas, give me a shout. I’ll post more on what to do next very soon… Either subscribe or let me know if you want to be advised when this is ready for you.
Have fun!
And if you want to download the above in a Word document…
Internet marketing strategy questionnaire
Those are some thought-provoking questions. Answering them should result in a few epiphanies, as is.
They have value just in terms of focusing thought, even without the eventual “to do” information that’s forthcoming.
Thanks for giving us some good directions for centering our thoughts.
Marvellous blog, Babs. Thanks for this.
Doug
Nice blog Thanks for this useful list post!
This is content i was looking for – excellent points made.