Nathan R. Elson on Web Marketing

This week I was fortunate enough to wrangle in a friend and past colleague of mine, Nathan Elson from Enthusiast Web Solutions, to do a quick marketing/marketing strategy post for me. So without further delay...

"In your browser open a new tab. Navigate to google.com. Do a search for “Web Marketing Strategy”. What do you see?

I see nearly 45 million search results with the top page amounting to gimmicks, formulas and folks trying to sell a commoditized version of what they do.

Now ask yourself, what does any of this have to do with my business?

There is the rub.

The hardest part about navigating the environment that is the modern webasphere is understanding how you fit in. There are some simple things that you can do to figure out what you should be doing on the web – and armed with this information you can create a set of criteria for you to make an intelligent strategic decision about how to spend your web dollars.

The very first thing I do when I engage a new client about web services is to find out about what marketing means to them, what they have done in the past, and their personal experiences as a citizen of the web. This sets a great foundation for understanding on all sides of what web means. This allows a framework to be built that can compare apples to apples when evaluating services rather then guessing about it.

The second thing that is important is to create a baseline for future measurement. Seriously, how can you figure out if you are doing what you need to be doing on the web without some way to figure out if what you are doing is successful?

Third, look at what is being done and ask this question:

1.) Is what is being done in my field working?

If yes, what can I do better – if no, what can I do different? The key to being strategic with web marketing is to create an opportunity to win, too many website are built that have no shot of winning in their marketplace.

Finally, only do as much as you are capable of handling. That is, content creation and management can be a tricky deal that can be both expensive and time consuming. This means being realistic in both estimating your time and your budget. If you have the right circumstances, outside providers can be a great thing.

Once you work through these four issues you can put together a checklist of things that are the non-negotiables for any solution that you evaluate as well as a checklist of things that are great but not deal breakers. Once you have an objective criterion in which to evaluate vendor offerings it is not such a big deal to wade through web service proposals to see which one is the best fit (and remember price should also be considered as a checklist item – but do it with an eye for total cost of ownership, not initial fees).

The bottom line – have a strategy for the web, better yet have a strategy for marketing in general and develop an arm of that specifically for the web.

By Nathan R. Elson - Enthusiast Web Solutions - Visit Nathan R. Elson's Bio