4. Implement Your Site and Marketing Plan
Build the site and adequately resource your development, maintenance and marketing plan.
Be careful - good Web designers are not usually good graphic artists. Make sure your designer has access to a specialist graphic artist (ask for samples). And good designers are definately not good Marketers, so always use a specialist.
- Choose your specialist Internet Marketing firm before you start your development, so they can have input to the design process (eg search engine optimisation, sales copywriting).
- Make sure your Internet Marketing firm does MORE than just send reports on a regular basis.
- Be suspicious of low cost marketing/promotion plans. Low cost will invariably mean low value over a sustained period.
- Set your Marketing Budget according to the percentage of total sales that you can reasonably expect to achieve on the Internet in the medium term rather than on what you have been getting in the past with a sub-optimal site and budget.
Internet marketing, as with most types of marketing, is not a one-time affair. A combination of short, medium and longer-term commitment and resource allocation, together with strategies of measuring and adjusting will help ensure continuing growth and improvement.