Market Planning for the Web

Internet marketing is not rocket science. If you do the basics well and avoid some common errors, you should succeed. Here are top mistakes marketers make online:

1. Failing to adequately analyze their web markets and their web site competitors. Analyzing the web sites of your bricks and mortar competitors is not enough. A thorough market analysis is essential.
2. Failing to understand how people reach their site. What brought them to the site and how did they find it - search engine, directory, word of mouth?
3. Not defining a clear marketing strategy for the website. The market analysis (above) is a precondition.
4. Not defining clear and measurable, goals for the website. The market analysis and strategy (above) are preconditions. Without goals, how do the staff responsible for the web business know what they should be aiming at?
5. Not clearly stating how visitors will benefit by using their web site. The main site pages and particularly the home page, need to state benefits - how they will benefit from your products and why they should do business with your organization. Every page must answer the unstated question in the visitor's mind - what's in this, for me?
6. Making it difficult to find their web site. Search engines and directories are highly effective and virtually free, traffic generators. An appallingly high percentage of web pages either cannot be, or cannot easily be, indexed by search engines.
7. Making it difficult for people to use their web site. Mistakes include essential information that is difficult to find (such as having to complete an order before learning the shipping costs), too many layers and the use of heavy bandwidth graphics (your customers, that is people who return to your site, are not impressed with the fancy graphics after their first time, they just perceive them to be wasting their valuable time).
8. Overspending on advertising while virtually ignoring very significantly more cost effective alternatives to drive traffic to their web site.
9. Failing to understand that their web customers are smart and ruthless with a massive number of competitors, instantly available to them. Don't like something about your site? CLICK and they're gone.
10. Failing to cost effectively spend their precious cash and assuming that easy capital raising conditions will last long enough for them to reach a positive cash flow.
11. Inadequately integrating their web site with their bricks and mortar operation. People use the web as part of their buying process. They go online to source vendors, check product feature, specifications and prices. But if they are buying other than inexpensive or uncomplicated products or services, they still will want to talk to a salesperson. Determine all information a customer requires to make an informed purchase then allocate this appropriately between the website and your bricks and mortar staff.

The Internet Marketing Engine assists the: 

1. development of Internet strategies
2. preparation of Internet marketing plans
3. improvement of web sites on market and competitive research