Key to success in Online Business remains in a continuous optimization of the website contents. Each phase of the cycle builds upon the previous phase, creating a complete internet marketing plan for your business that’s targeted and measurable. This means increasing your business’ visibility on the Internet and driving more customers through your web properties to increase sales and ultimately, profitability. This has a proven lifecycle comprising of following processes:
1. Research:
Internet marketing research is the process of searching the internet for the purpose of gathering information about your niche market segments, so that you can further analyze it to explore new opportunities in the market. It can help in identifying problems, potential challenges and monitor the performance of a company. Research is an ongoing process that has to be done periodically in order to catch the market pulse and act accordingly. Internet marketing research is a powerful aspect to your online business. As the internet continues to evolve, so too should your research efforts.
2. Strategy:
Strategy is a workable and methodical plan of action for an entrepreneur to achieve success in his online business. It is also considered to be a hypothesis that suggests the direction of an online business to fulfill its vision or goal and at the same time maximize the potential of the success of a business in the future. The objective of online business is that you can enhance performance of your business which can help you establish good business environment in the future. An internet business is one based on carefully thought of moves. Online business strategy defines how the products are introduced, sold and finally delivered exclusively through internet. Internet marketing strategy represents one of the most cost-effective opportunities for growth.
3. Planning:
To get success in your online business planning, you should plan your online business effectively. Breakdown the activities, say website design, into number of tasks, set the time lines for each task and assign the responsibility of each task to competent designer, programmer etc. Work out the cost for each of these activities and see that the total cost matches your expectation.
4. Execution:
Once you have prepared an effective plan with proper costing and satisfied with budget, the next task is to execute your plan effectively within the planned budget. Note down actuals and prepare a chart showing budgeted costs, actuals and deviations if any. This will help you to monitor the effectiveness of your online business performance.
5. Reporting & Analytics:
Next process is to prepare performance reports to analyse the return on Investment. Reporting format greatly depends upon your success measurement criteria. You can use various web analysis tools for online web analytics. What is Web Analytics? Web analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of Internet data for the purposes of understanding and optimizing Web usage. Web Analytics is a study of the performance parameters that are directly or indirectly associated with a website. The parameters such as number of visitors, conversions, clicks, impressions, bounce rate, frequency, etc. are part of online web analytics. Web Analytics is also used for measurement of profitability of the online marketing strategy being employed.
6. Optimize:
What is Website Optimization: Website Optimization is about making small or minor modifications to parts of your website and to improve its rankings in the major search engines for organic or natural search results. Website performance optimization is a process that produces highly competitive websites that outperform on every measure including traffic, speed, conversion rates, sales and return on investment. This might apply to a landing page, micro-site, website, online catalogue, online slide deck, Interactive tool etc. An important part of the web optimisation process includes testing, where we study the relative effectiveness of different variations of a page. Web Optimization consists of a broad set of tools, methods, processes and strategies that have the objective to improve the website conversion rates and has to be pursued on continuous basis.
