The article by Guy Masono I’ve referred to in the past describes the last two of the 4Ts as Transact and Track. I’m going to discuss in more detail what I believe these two mean for your marketing campaign.

Transact, Masono writes, “refers to opening a two-way communication with customers and prospects based on the nature of an inquiry.” For example, your website has a lead-generating form that visitors may fill out in order to receive more information about a product or service.

The “communication” results when you or one of your employees replies to that inquiry. How quickly do you respond? Do you respond with an automated e-mail reply? With a phone call? If you don’t hear back from the customer, do you respond again? If so, how? With another phone call? With more information sent via e-mail.

Follow-up is key. It really is more than key – it is critical. Do your salespeople know what your marketing department is doing so that they may respond appropriately when a marketing campaign begins? Does your fulfillment manager have the tools, systems and processes ready to get your customers the products they order when they order it. Have a link missing in this communication/sales/fulfillment chain and just watch the chaos – and lost sales – that result.

Which brings me to the final T of Masono’s article, Track. I’ve seen it too many times – a business owner or marketing department spends oodles of dough in marketing, but keeps track of nothing. Did the direct mail piece bring in the $1 million in sales over six months, or was that the pay-per-click campaign on Google? Or a combination? Or neither?  There are a number of tools out there to help you do this – some are free and some are available for a nominal cost.  If you don’t know how to set these up properly, I recommend hiring someone to help you with this as the costs of setting this up will far outweigh the benefits of saved marketing dollars that are being wasted on inefficient efforts.

Track your results today and you’ll know where best to spend your marketing dollars tomorrow.

Do you really know your target market? Do you know what they think? Where they live? How old they are? What websites they frequent? What keywords do they use when they search for something online?

If you don't - if you don't live and breath and think as your target market thinks - you must find out, because once you do, then you’ll know how to market to them.

You also will want to drill down and define exactly who your perfect customer is. Let's say, for example, you’re in the business loan industry. So when someone asks you who your target market is, do you just say "businesses who need loans?" I hope not – that's too broad.  It's amazing how many answers I get to this question as it relates to hosting.  In this case, the answer is often "anybody with a website."  Again this is too broad.

Instead, think niche. Are you looking for minority entrepreneurs? Women entrepreneurs? New business owners? Franchise owners? New franchise owners? A female who just bought a new franchise? Yes? Then just how old is this woman with a new franchise? Has she owned a franchise before? Is she the solo owner or is her husband or another partner involved in the business with her? You get the idea. Drill down to this woman's essence - you could write her biography if asked.

Hello again. It’s been a long while since I've posted here and I apologize for my absence. I'll be posting regularly from now on.

In my last post I talked a bit about the different strategies - tactics - one could use in an online campaign. Today I'm going to walk you through how to actually decide which strategies to use.

First, come up with a budget. Pay-per-click, banners, etc. are more expensive than article marketing or even a search engine optimized (SEO) news release campaign. You can allocate your funds across different tactics, both online and off. For example, SEO, pay-per-click, affiliate programs, blogging, some media buying can work very well with some offline stratgies such as trade shows, advertising in industry journals, participating in your local chamber's events, perhaps even some direct mail.

If you've had success with certain tactics in the past, focus on those; less so the new - at least at first. You do not want to spread your tactics - or your budget - too thinly. In fact, you could find lose focus and thus weakening your results. Few of us have exceptionally deep marketing pockets. Focus is key.

It’s a sad day when someone spends a good amount of money on marketing but has little budget for the follow through that’s necessary as your tactics bring results. You will need to have systems and processes in place to respond to queries and - happy day! - sales. You’ll also need to track each marketing tactic’s effectiveness. No need to keep paying for pay-per-click if you find most of your results are coming from article marketing - but you need to keep track of each part of your campaign to see which is bringing you the best results and adjust your budget allocation accordingly.

How do you decide between on and offline?  Within online, what about Paid Search vs SEO vs site placements (banners, text links, sponsored sections etc) vs PR vs creating content such as articles etc?  In a perfect world with unlimited resources you would do it all but business, like life, is a matter of making choices and choosing between options.  The answer to this question and breakdown depends very much on your individual situation and ideally is derived from a higher-level strategic plan.  One of the things that continues to surprise me is how many businesses don’t really have much of a plan if one at all.   This can often mean that they don’t have a good handle on what their target audience is. 

In all my marketing courses, we covered the 4 Ps of marketing but I really resonated with the article adapting these principles to the web and using the 4 T’s instead.  I encourage you to read the short article on the 4T's.

This is not rocket science or particularly innovative but understanding and more importantly, implementing these 4 Ts is crucial to your marketing success.  Next time I will explore the 4 Ts in more detail including the second T – Tactics.