The Broad Strokes
Online Marketing… Its a really broad term. How is it different than SEO or SEM or Social Media or Digital Marketing etc? Online Marketing is the game plan. It’s the coaches playbook. Its the summation of all those other components used as part of your strategy to generate leads or traffic or phone calls or clicks or subscriptions… whatever is important to your particular business model.
What’s the Goal?
The real question is, do you have a strategy? Do you have a game plan? Even if you don’t know the first thing about social media or SEO you should know what it is you are looking to get out of online marketing. What do you want to accomplish? How high have you set the bar? How much are you willing to spend? What kind of return are you expecting? What is your goal?
Once you understand the goal, the rest becomes relatively easy! You don’t have to necessarily know the fine points of the various facets of online marketing. You can hire people like me to do that for you. But you need to know why hiring someone like me either is or is not a value. Your goals will help a professional like myself determine how we can best serve you and help you accomplish the goal – it all starts with the goal.
What are the components?
So you think you have a goal in mind. Now what? Well there are three main components to Online Marketing:
1) The Website – your virtual brick and mortar. Here you’re all about business.
2) Social Media – your party hat – this is like your hangouts for networking in the “old days”. (In the car business we called that the local bar.)
3) Manipulation – Push advertising, Pull advertising, etc.(SEO/SEM/PPC/SMM – Social Media Marketing)
We’ll break these into separate articles to dive into the various facets of each. It’s ok if you don’t understand the acronyms, we’ll get into that later!
So which of these three components do you think are the most important? Please comment! And REMEMBER: There are NO stupid questions!