Grasp Emarketing Blog

Defining an effective “e-marketing strategy” is most important part of Internet Marketing. E-Marketing without an effective strategy is similar to a Scientist doing some random experiments. This type of Internet-marketing does not give the desired results or sometimes no result at all. Thus you not only risk your money but loose the time. During this time probably one of your competitors will take a lead and reap the fruits while you helplessly see your efforts going waste.

Defining a strategy for e-marketing is similar to any other marketing strategy except that our target audience is the one who is on Internet. Here are ten questions that you should ask yourself, your decision makers which will help you build your solid e-marketing strategy:
1. What is the value proposition of your product/ services?
The value proposition of your services will help you determine the type of content, keywords, articles, case studies, press releases etc. that you should write. Unless you are clear on the value proposition of your product and services
2. What is the problem that your product and services solves?
This is the second most important question that one should answer before starting Internet Marketing
3. What are your Key focuses and what are your general offerings?
Most organization that want to go to market do the mistake of generalizing their services. They often want to offer all possible services that they can. While it is possible to offer all services, it is not possible to be market leader in all of the products and services. You should select at the most 5-6 key areas where you want to become the market leader. This will narrow the focus and increase your reach to a niche area.
4. What Geographies do you want to target to?
Geographical strategy helps you to concentrate and focus your e-marketing further. Every geography has its own challenges. The more geographies you want to focus on the more resources you need not only for marketing but also for sales and operations. It is advised that a startup should focus on less geographies while an established player can experiment with going to new geographies as and when possible.
5. What are your key strengths which differentiates you from your competitors?
Identifying your key strengths which clearly differentiates you from your competitors should provide a direction to your e-marketing strategies?
6. Do you have sufficient information about your competitors and what they are doing to win over the market?
As marketing is all about getting ahead of competition, one needs to know as much as possible about the competition.
7. What is your purpose of Internet marketing?
Broadly there are two purpose of Internet Marketing: (a) Product Branding and (b) Lead Generation. Both of these are Internet connected, however, depending one your industry and sales model, you have to prioritize the purpose so you can define which road to take. Marketing for branding and marketing for lead generation requires different type of skills and efforts.
8. Do you need immediate results or want to invest in long term results?
Internet marketing offers both types of results: Immediate results by quick spending in tools and technologies of Search Engine Marketing, long term results by investing in phased investment in Search Engine Optimization etc. Both have their advantages and disadvantages. Depending one your business model and your
9. Do you have sales and operational capability to meet your marketing promise?
When e-marketing starts succeeding, it gives overwhelming work to your sales team and operations. Unless marketing and sales are closely knitted to each other, sales efforts can go haywire. E-marketing is about creating leads to the sales team as well as provide a validity to your product and services that sales is trying to pitch. Many companies market their product heavily but fail to deliver the promise that marketing creates. If this happens your marketing starts going haywire. Thus your marketing message should match with your sales and operational capabilities.

For example some companies claims to responds within 24 hours of an inquiry, but that never happens because either the salesman is too busy or there is no mechanism to align the customer information with sales management.
10. Investments, Expected Results and ROI from e-marketing?
Once can reach a goal only if one knows it. Running aimlessly in E-marketing leads to now-where. You should be clear on how much you can spend on e-marketing and what you expects from it. E-marketing is a never ending process, because new competitors will always keep entering the markets and budget pressures will always be there the financial decision makers should clearly define their financial limitations and expected results.

While the results of e-marketing can be phenomenal, they can take equal amount of efforts and take some time to come. Like real estate cannot be built in a few days or months, the Internet Assets also takes time. One must take good care of budgets and not spend it doing experiments an adventures.

Spend within your limitations and expected generic results.