Mapping Out Your Internet Strategy

The internet is a vast expanse. Millions of marketing dollars are being wasted each month because companies refuse to take the time to identify their ideal prospects. Once known, companies need to develop visibility strategy to be seen in all the right venues where their prospects gather. Assume, after some investigation, the locations where the ideal prospects were found are:

• reading industry blogs
• gathering on forums
• subscribing to monthly newsletters
• using paid search
• attending webinars

Let’s say, during the same investigation no evidence was found that our prospects or the competition were found at social media sites such as Twitter or Facebook. Nor were they found at download sites such as iTunes or YouTube. For this reason, we’ll set these venues aside.

Some venues undoubtedly are more fruitful than others, but resources need to be spent wisely. For instance, working with a pay-per-lead company just takes money. They do all the advertising and then sends prospects your way. You just have to close the deal. On the other hand, running Google AdWord campaigns without the help of a PPC professional takes a good amount of money, time, and know-how.

Perhaps a good strategy would be to create a spreadsheet of the potential places your prospects might be found. Then gauge whether gaining visibility in one location vs. another takes more time, money, or skill. Let’s put together this spreadsheet of the different venues where your prospects hang out and rate whether time, money, or knowhow are going to be the determining factors in gaining visibility.

This Microsoft Excel spreadsheet gives you a jump-start on developing your own visibility chart of where your ideal prospects gather:

As you can see from this document, the ROI column shows which venue would probably give the best return on investment. These numbers are subjective until real results start coming in, but experience tells us that pay-per-click campaigns have a greater and more immediate return than sending out a newsletter.

The Money column helps identify which strategies cost marketing dollars and which simply take time and know-how.

The Notes column keeps track of special circumstances. For instance, you may need writing or marketing help in one area whereas in another area you feel self-sufficient.

There are also many efforts that draw new visitors to the website that are not listed on this spreadsheet: e-mail marketing, landing pages, search engine optimization, and backlink campaigns.