So is internet marketing really like a game of Tennis? Well not really but for both disciplines there are some factors that hold true for both, for each you always have to bring your best game forward in order to succeed, but what else do you have to do to win this game we call Internet Marketing?
The very first thing you have to do is Set your objectives. Before you think about keywords or what your competition are doing really sit back and identify what goal you want for your website. To begin with just have one clearly defined idea that you can work with, then think how your website and other online profiles you have can help with meeting this goal.
It’s easier I think to work with an example, so lets pick a ladies fashion shop, who typically you would class as very much an offline business. In order for the website to make a difference (lets assume they have not got an online shop) then it needs to drive footfall physically into the shop where the final ‘conversion’ will take place, a simple way to achieve this is to offer a 10% voucher as a thank you for visiting us.
So you now have a way of measuring your success, which is how many 10% vouchers you take in the shop, and you’ll know how many you want to receive to make it worth your while.. lets say 10 a month.
So your goal is 10 vouchers a month, therefore your call to action on your website is to ‘download this voucher’ with perhaps an email in exchange for it.
Now you have you call to action, you can get this defined in your analytics so that you have a clear idea of how many vouchers have been downloaded (for not all will make it to the shop!)
Now you can think about the content that you need to create to support this goal, at the moment it is the summertime so you could put a 4 week content campaign together about packing for your summer holiday, this could be a mixture of blog posts, images (very important for a clothes shop) check lists – all useful information for people about to go on holiday. Your keyword research will be around the ‘summer clothes’ variety and you’ll need to do some research here on what people are typing in and whats ‘in vogue’ this year. Of course at the end of every piece of content you would put in your call to action… Want 10% off this fabulous beach bag then click here…. you get the idea.
If you are clever you can create some pieces of evergreen content (for example a holiday check list) that you can re-purpose and use again or turn into another content item (read about re-purposing content on this blog post but the main focus is your content must support your business goal.
Put together your content calendar and stick to it like glue then focus on how you are going to distribute your work. This will depend on your business type and which platforms work hardest for you. and each may be subtly different. However, know in advance where you will place your content so that on your publishing days you have a process you can go through, it does make life much easier if it is pre-planned. (take a look at our free stuff that will help you with this.)
The Game is Internet Marketing
The Set is setting one clear goal with one clear call to action as a starting point
The Match is matching your content creation to your goal.
and just like Andy Murray, you may have to try at it a few times with different game plans before you finally break through, but the winning is oh so sweet!
So there you have it Game, Set and Match, perhaps internet marketing is like Tennis after all!!