The weaknesses of Tick Box online marketing
A few of my recent posts have touched upon the subject of
targeting and planning in internet marketing (see about E-Profiling, Site-Targeted Campaigns and MySpace).
As a traditional marketing consultant who has evolved into
an online marketing professional, it’s my opinion that many simple marketing
principles have been lost in the rush to adopt new online marketing methods.
Don’t get me wrong - I’m the biggest fan you’ll find of tools
like Pay Per Click advertising, which have enabled me to help almost any client
to promote themselves effectively for modest cost.
But my primary concern is that planning online marketing can
all too easily be based on what I call the Tick Box approach. In other words, simply
working down the list of online marketing tools; directory submissions, PPC
advertising, email marketing and so on, rather than thinking which tools are actually
going to be best for reaching your target market.
Which brings me neatly to my next point. Many online
businesses seem to forget that they need to know who their target market is,
just as much as an offline business (or even more so, because of the remoteness
of the web).
Yet very seldom does an online marketing campaign truly
segment its potential market. Often markets are defined as simply ‘Google
traffic’ or ‘PPC traffic’, without reference to the actual people likely to use
these channels themselves.
Which is ironic considering the relative ease with which
bespoke web development and tracking could help analyse, segment and categorise
customers obtained through different internet marketing streams. Such insight
could then be applied to the choice of online promotional tools, and how each
tool or message should be targeted.
Upon reflection, I suppose my concerns are nothing new. I’ve
seen plenty of businesses waste money on poorly targeted offline marketing over
the years, because they didn’t think about their customers first (if they even
knew who their customers were).
However with the power, speed, sophistication and effectiveness
of online marketing tools available to us now, poor customer targeting starts
to looks more inexcusable than ever before.
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