Which Tool to deploy for your Strategy? It depends
What’s the first tactic and tool to deploy? It depends.
Ian, the CEO of Portent Interactive, has some analysis showing that the fastest and most effective conversion rates are from house email lists and search engine marketing or organic search strategies. I’d suggest that the marketing or prospect to customer life cylce is likely very long and there’s many events that need to happen before a search strategy needs to become to the forefront. For example, prospects may or may not have a need, and the awareness needs to be raised, secondly, they may not know the solution or may need to compare analysis. It’s possible that the search process that leads directly to conversion may not always be the entire prospect life cycle –why social web programs may be important.
On a similar note, the Economic Times of India reports that a survey conducted over executives indicate that: “E-mail was the preferred online marketing tool with 83% of the survey respondents saying they use it, followed by paid keyword search (63%) and video ads (33%). Among new technologies used for marketing were blogs (32%), podcasts (25%), online social networks (22%) and virtual worlds (13%).” Email also has prevelence here, but that’s because it’s often an existing customer base, or one that has already gestured interest.
A search expert recently confirmed all of this, saying Google is the Killer App, it’s true. I’ve been watching, in fact, cataloging the many forms of Web Marketing (See list) and have a good sense of how many of these tools work.
So let’s take a step back at the overall Web Strategy warcamp, when deploying your strategy, here are the steps I recommend: 1) First determine the needs of the users and community, what do they want, where are they, who are they, and why are they going to care? 2) Understand business needs, what are you trying to accomplish? What are the short and long term goals of the organization? 3) What tools and technology (resources) do you have? What will work? Please see the three spheres of Web Strategy to learn more.
