Manage your Internet Marketing Consultant

Internet Marketing is a specialist area; so -unless your whole business is focussed on the web - most companies will want to use outside expertise in the same way as for advertising or direct marketing.

The question is then: how do you manage such external contractors effectively?

It can of course be quite simple. You agree a budget with your consultant, let him loose for a few months, and then go back and check how many sales he has brought in.  Standard practice with advertising agencies - except that, with them, you rarely know afterwards the actual sales results!

Most internet marketers are happy to optimise for search engines and spend your money on pay per click advertising.

That means that they concentrate on bringing in new traffic in the knowledge that some will actually order. But generating web traffic is only one stage of web marketing. The second stage is the process of converting a visitor into a customer. The third stage is providing effective customer service at minimum cost. 

The importance of each stage will vary over time. A new website must first generate traffic to have any use at all. Those sites that are happy to have just 1% of visitors actually ordering should perhaps look more at the reactions of the other 99%. It may well be easier - and cheaper - to modify the site to convert more of your existing visitors than to go on attracting new ones. As you build the business, the potential to automate back end systems can substantially increase profit.

The internet is the ideal method of maintaining a dialogue with large numbers of customers.  That is an area far too important simply to hand over to outsiders.  So you must ally your market knowledge of customer needs, your in-house expertise, with the specialist knowledge of internet marketing techniques from your external consultant.

You need a flexible strategy where jointly you review progress on a monthly basis, try out new opportunities and check the overall health of your customer contact.

If you want me to help you put in place such a flexible system, reply to this email now and put 'HELP' in the subject line. I will then contact you.

Talk to you next month

Stephen Orr