Answers Next

Answer #1

Tyler has a good start, but really viral/social is one part of an overall strategy…as with any marketing program. While free, the shortcoming can be that some products services lend themselves more to catching on socially than others.

If I were just getting started, I would approach it like this:

Define your goals. They need to be clear and measurable (quantitatively). They should directly translate into growing your business (increasing traffic to a site is great, but also useless if that traffic doesn’t generate revenue). They should include who you want to target, what action you want them to take, when, and at what cost. Spend ample time determining what metrics you should focus on and calculating targets you should hit to get/stay profitable. Setting the wrong goals will ruin everything else. When in doubt, be conservative.
Define your budget. There are sooooooo many options to market online (forget offline, the most efficient way to drive traffic to a site is online). Your budget will determine how much freedom you have to pursue different options. Some channels may be completely out of your price range. Many others will most likely not be.
Research and make a list of your paid and unpaid options (facebook ads, ad networks, mobile, youtube, twitter, blogs, search ads, etc). Most online publishers have made the research & set-up process very user friendly.
Determine which of the programs are realistic for your budget and goals. You won’t know which channels work for your business until you try them. Start with what is cheapest and has the greatest ability to target your customers. For the paid programs, set an amount to allocate to testing. It should be enough $ to get sufficient traffic to evaluate how programs perform, but not so much that once you’re done testing you’re out of funds. Also make sure you have systems in place to measure how the programs perform. Google analytics is a great place to start. You need the ability to measure how traffic from any channel performs against the goals you set in step 1. You also need to have a basic understanding of how you adjust performance or re-allocate $ during your tests based on performance.
Run your tests. Make changes while testing to try to improve performance. After the test are complete, compare performance from the channels you tested. What worked, what didn’t, what can you learn from what did/didn’t work so that you do better best time? If you’ve spent sufficient time on the early steps, you should be able to evaluate your results against goals and determine which programs to invest more heavily in and which to drop. Be careful not to throw out a program too soon when changes might improve performance, or continue testing too long for something you think “should” work. Obviously how you change and tweak campaigns comes from a lot of experience, but as with most things online there are great blogs, forums, and help sites to pick up tips on the technical parts of how to do this.
Whew. That might seem like a lot, but it’s honestly way too brief an explanation if you’re thinking seriously about this. I can’t emphasize enough the need to plan, set appropriate goals, and ensure your ability to measure against them. If you get to step 5 and then realize your goals were wrong or you could not track performance accurately, you’ve wasted a lot of time and money.

Hope this helps…good luck!

Answered By: guest [417 ]