Deciding on Your Tactics – Your First Step in Your Online Marketing Campaign

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 strategies 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.

The tactics you use need to be driven by where your target market “hangs out.” You’ll also need to know how your target market responds to various tactics. I’ll cover this – “Targeting” – in my next post.