This post was written by the Web Marketing Ninja—a professional online marketer for a major web brand, who’s sharing his tips undercover here at ProBlogger. Curious? So are we!
One of the most common mistakes people make when entering into the world of online marketing and sales is having a narrow understanding of what the discipline actually entails. This tunnel vision is not focused on one specific area—it’s simply based on the fact that most people’s understanding of online marketing stretches only as far as their personal network.
If they have family or friends who might, for example, be search engine marketers, then their vision of online marketing is probably limited to working the search engines. If they’re conversion marketers, they’ll think sales funnels is where it’s all at.
As the online marketing industry matures, this tunnel vision is becoming more of an issue. True generalists are becoming few and far between, as it’s almost impossible to follow the industry as a whole in great depth. The generalists are out there, but the likelihood of one being in your network is pretty slim…
In this post, I wanted to take a huge step back and look at the online marketing discipline as a whole, so you can ensure you’ve got an open mind when it comes to your own approach, and ensure that your implementation is a balanced one.
I see online marketing as being like an onion: it has a lot of different layers, which combine to create a perfect whole. Let’s peel back each one in turn…
Brand management
Whether you like it or not, you have a brand, your business has a brand, and if you don’t care about it, others will shape it for you. You might get lucky and your brand could magically evolve for the good, but if you want to reduce the odds of a catastrophe, you should pay attention to your brand. You can’t dictate a brand, but you can help shape what it is you project.
Brand management isn’t all touchy-feely sentiment: there is actually method behind the madness. I’ll no doubt talk about brand management in future, but if you can’t wait and want a 24-hour crash course in branding, The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding should be high on your must-read list.
PR management
In all honesty PR isn’t my strong point, so I feel a little guilty talking about it. What I can say it’s its valuable. Good PR people will put your brand and your product in front of a whole new audience. They mold media to their whim, and although I’ve got no idea how they do it, I love it when they do!
Community management
A couple of years ago, this would have resided within the brand segment of online branding. But it has evolved to become something that requires an approach all of its own. Community management includes social media, but it’s not limited to that: there are dozens of different types of communities, and you need to be thinking about them all. I could perhaps have called this engagement management, as that’s really the key measurement for this segment of online marketing, but the brand specialists will only argue with me that’s what they do!
Product management
Online, people are only starting to understand the value of pure product management and product marketing. Basically this is the discipline of researching, defining, shaping, building, promoting, and managing a specific product. This could be a service, an eproduct, or even a physical product. There a are a lot of great methodologies around when it comes to managing a product, and this discipline is the origin of such buzzwords as “unique selling proposition.” It’s an extremely important, but often underutilized area.
Market research
The role of the market research team is you give the other areas insight into what’s happening both in the industry as a whole, and within the groups of your customer base. They’ll provide competitive intelligence as well as helping you to discover new opportunities in the industry. Product marketers work closely with reattach marketers to get an understanding of the impact (positive or negative) their products are having, in order to assist in the evolution of the product. Usually research is conducted in qualitative (high-detail, low-volume) and quantitative (low-detail, high-volume) ways.
Campaign management
This where most people’s understanding of online marketing starts and ends. But as you can see, it’s only 1/6 of the picture. Online advertising, SEO, SEM, email marketing, product launches, affiliate management, and conversion optimization all sit under the campaign management banner. People seem to gravitate to these disciplines because they’re measurable and directly attributable to revenue. But the indisputable fact is that they’re dependent on all of the above. If you have a great brand with lots of convergence in the media, with a heavily engaged community, and a suite of amazing products, your campaigns will practically construct themselves. Sure, if you’re not running campaigns you’re leaving money on the table—but it’s not the only consideration you need to make.
Like an onion, online marketing has many layers, and it’s important you consider them all. If you jump straight into the campaign stage of online marketing, your conversions will suffer. So if you’re involved in marketing now, or you think it’s something you need to do, step back and ensure your plan covers all disciplines of online marketing.
Stay tuned from most posts by the secretive Web Marketing Ninja—a professional online marketer for a major web brand, who’s sharing his tips undercover here at ProBlogger.
