Ten Steps to Successful Online Marketing

A successful website can help your company cut costs, generate income and expand horizons with new product and market opportunities. An unsuccessful website wastes precious time and resources. Worse, it can damage customer relationships and destroy business development opportunities.

The following ten steps will help CEOs and senior executives manage the development and implementation of successful ebusiness initiatives.

• Identify the business problem(s) you want to solve, from generating qualified sales leads to reducing the number of customer service calls.
• Estimate the value of these solutions and determine the level of investment you are willing to make to solve them.
• Write a bullet-point business plan outlining the project’s goals & objectives, timeframe and the criteria you will use to measure success.
• Share the plan with your management team. Unless it calls for a stand-alone business unit, the initiative will need their support to succeed.
• Assign P/L responsibility to an experienced project manager who understands the plan. Look for common sense, not high-tech jargon.
• Review the project manager’s implementation plan. It should start small and move quickly, building on success. Expect to revise the plan often.
• Outsource everything. It’s cheaper and faster than doing things in-house, and it’s less disruptive to other departments.
• Provide adequate resources for design, production, maintenance, and don’t forget promotion. Websites are invisible without it.
• Manage by objective. If the project’s goals are being met it will be easy to justify an ongoing investment. If not, it will be easy to shut it down.
• Demand success, but tolerate small failures. The Internet changes too fast to get everything right the first time. Push the envelope to succeed.

Big Hairy Secret: Start with a one page, bullet point business plan. Let your project manager worry about the technology.