February 20, 2011

Planning your Web Marketing channels

The problem with technology, and social sites in general, is they are easy, cheap and fast to set up. There is a growing trend to create presences for the sake of a presence, and quite often these channels are created with ill-defined goals.

There is nothing wrong with experimentation, but as we enter a maturity stage of web marketing, it is important to clearly define the ‘why’.

Before creating any web channel (website, webinar, social media presence), you should sit down and ask Why? What is the purpose of this channel? How does it fit into your broader strategy? What do we want out of this channel?

It is a very simple exercise, but the results will save you plenty of headaches moving forwards. I’ve created a basic table below, which I’ve regularly used as a tool to refine and validate my thinking.

This exercise is relatively simple, yet being forced to sit down and jot ideas down on paper can uncover many red herrings, and ensures your thinking is valid.

If you are targeting Existing customers, it is important to define a purpose too, such as:

  • Customer Support;
  • Sharing information;
  • Increasing up-sells;
  • Increasing satisfaction;
  • Building community; or
  • Increased referrals.

Now, you have a (basic) macro view of our organizational channels and tactics. Another exercise I often follow is digging a little deeper on my audience, in a macro sense. Are you looking at existing customers, or trying to find new ones? How will you find new users? This quick macro view helps you manage all channels your organization is running, and find potential synergies / overlaps among them.

If you are targeting New customers:

If you are targeting new customers, firstly ask whether they currently use this channel:

  • If yes, why? How often?
  • If no, why not? Where else are they? Fish where the fish are. If your target market is not already on Facebook don’t try and drag them there. It takes a lot of time and effort to bring people to a new channel, why not just meet them where they already are?

How will we attract users to this channel?

As much as I’d love for ‘build it and they will come’ to be a viable strategy, it is not. We need to sit down and define how we will funnel our target market into each channel. Established channels can serve as viable tools to populate a new one.

Finally, metrics for success and objectives cannot be overlooked. Your metrics and objectives should correlate, with the objective being a defined volume of your metric. For example, if your purpose for a webinar was lead generation, the metric may be qualified leads, with the objective being 10 qualified leads. If your purpose was awareness, your metric may be unique visitors with an objective of 1,000.

It is important to note that there are many metrics that should be measured which lead to your objective metric; in the lead example above, unique visitors will lead to e-mail subscriptions, which will lead to qualified leads. Often, these metrics work together to form a funnel, which I will write about later in the month. For this exercise, I frequently list the key, last-touch metric that is required to reach my goal.

Once you have this completed table, you will that:

  1. You have been forced to think through each of your planned tactics, and have likely changed directions once or twice based upon it (the why); and
  2. You now have a nice table outlining everything you are working on. As your organization scales, it is easier for new workers to pick up where you left off.

I hope you found this one helpful! It is an exercise that, as mentioned, I often use.