14 Mar 2008

Internet Marketing Model

Here is a first draft of an internet marketing model that has been kicking around in my head. The impetus was that I was asked to prepare a Internet Marketing Plan and I could not find a template of what to include. So here is what I started with (click the picture for a better quality picture).
Before even starting a internet marketing plan, you should have already done an competitive and market analysis of the industry (here's my competitive analysis template). That should help define your firm's business model which, in turn, influences the firm's marketing strategy. It is the firm marketing strategy that determines your internet marketing strategies. In their simplest form, I view internet marketing strategies as how can I use the internet to accomplish some marketing goal. The marketing goal of "building brand awareness" requires a different internet strategy than "converting sales". What ever the goal, you can break it up into sub-goals with some form of measurement attached to them. For each goal, your strategy should have a number of initiatives with their own accompanying measurements that will drive you to the goal. Initiatives will consist of a number of internal, external, and technological components that can be used (for a good list of potential internal and external internet marketing see this post by Jeremiah Owyang). Another key thing to remember that all marketing initiatives should strive to connect with a customer in one of the levels of the Hierarchy of Customer Engagement. Confused yet? I apologize. Here is an example of an initiative:
  • Goal: Reinforce brand image as athletic and action orientated.
  • Sub-Goal #1: Increase customer engagement on website
  • Initiative A: Video Content Initiative
  • Metrics: Unique Visitors per month, Visits/Unique Visitor per month, Video Views
  • Targets:
    • Raise unique visitors per month to 50,000 by year one
    • Raise Visits/Unique per month to 2.5 by year one
    • Achieve 500,000 on site video views by year one
    Company will create a videos of its celebrity athlete endorsers and post them to the website. Atleast one two minute video must be posted each week. During high profile competitions, company will post 5 two minute videos within 3 days of competition ending. Videos will be posted to an internal web page and the home page will present the most recent video updates.
So we took a company marketing goal, applied a internet marketing sub-goal, then identified an initiative with internal and technology components that will help us achieve that goal. Then, we identified how would we track success of the initiative. Note this initiative is designed to deliver a message to the consumer (and probably engage them). I hope this helps you visualize how to think about the internet and your business. I am sure you have better ideas than me, let me know your internet marketing plan best practices in the comments!