Online Marketing Strategy for Dubai based companies.
What is an online marketing strategy and do I need one?

The short answer to the second part of that question is yes. Does your online marketing strategy have to be complex and expensive? The answer to that is no.

To answer the first part of the question we need to explain a little bit about what actually makes up the online marketing world and how you would then build a strategy around that. Over the last couple of years, online marketing has become a buzz niche in the business market place. More and more service providers are popping up who can offer local businesses that edge over their competition by using elements of online marketing. Marketing Directors and Managers are expected to know the ins and outs of the online world, because after all, marketing is marketing right? Well it is true that what works in the offline world, works in the online world from a theoretical point of view but it’s the method of implementation that has some traditional marketers clutching as straws.

effective online marketing strategy encompasses a number of pieces of quite an elaborate jigsaw

How many pieces are there in the online marketing jigsaw?

To break it down a little further, the elements divide themselves into the following;

• direct response website,
• on page SEO,
• off page SEO,
• PPC,
• SEM,
• social media marketing,
• viral video marketing,
• twitter,
• YouTube,
• social bookmarking,
• email marketing,
• autoresponders
• and more…..

Understanding what each of these pieces means and how they go together is the key to a successful online presence. What has tended to happen though is that as these words and phrases have become more widely used and heard, organisations take the aspects they believe they should be utilising and then haphazardly go about implementing that single element, with no real direction or goal, other than the very generic one of ‘we need to be doing online marketing’. Whatever that is!!

Do I need a strategy? Surely I can just set this up myself or pay someone to do it for me?

It only takes 5 minutes to setup a Facebook page and there are loads of SEO companies out there right?

Over the last couple of years I have been implementing many of the pieces of the online puzzle to create multiple revenue streams for myself, but during this learning process of thousands of hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars I was also helping businesses to implement these strategies and increase their bottom line. I was also opening their eyes to a different way of marketing their products and services and in some cases creating products for them to actually sell.
What became clear was that many businesses, from the 1 man band to the multi national company were implementing what they thought were holistic online marketing strategies but were in fact only implementing single pieces of an overall strategy.
Strategic marketing and planning became a service we offered borne out of requests from senior level marketing professionals as well as business owners and operations directors to explain some of the proposals that were landing on their desks. I was being asked;

• What is SEO? And can it help me?
• Does this proposal represent a REAL strategy?
• What does PPC mean?
• How would I use something like PPC in my marketing plan?
• What is a ‘good’ daily budget?
• What exactly is a direct response website?
• Why didn’t my web designer build me one in the first place?
• Do I need everything they have outlined in this document?
• What is a social media marketing campaign?
• Surely I don’t need to be on Facebook, we are a professional company?
• What are Facebook Ads?
• Should I be using them?
• Am I being ripped off?
• I don’t understand the proposal so how can I know if the cost they are allocating to this is fair?

All legitimate questions that I am sure you have asked yourself over the last year or so at some point? If you take each of them one at a time, they all answerable to some degree with a little research. But a) do you have time to research them all and b) how do you know which one is the most important? Where should you spend the limited time you have? Because the last thing you want to happen is to pick the wrong one. Spend the time ‘implementing’ to the best of your knowledge and then see no return on your investment at all, right?

Online marketing doesn’t work. I knew I should have stuck with what I knew!

Have these words come from you in the last 18 months? I know a lot of people who have uttered those words recently and it pains me, because I know it does work! The secret is ‘Pulling it all together and implementing a structured plan’. Over the past 12 months, more and more companies we are speaking to are frustrated for this reason alone. The lack of direction and structured plan means that as various departments pick up 1 piece of the jigsaw and ‘implement’ it as best they can, they are in many cases not implementing correctly and perhaps even worse is that their actions might be directly conflicting with another departments attempt at implementing the same piece.

The strategy can be simple and easy to navigate, just like a good direct response website should be. It should reconcile all those required elements and have a structured holistic approach to each of them. This way, everyone gets what they want. Without a structured approach you will have a fragmented strategy whereby pieces of the puzzle are picked at random, or based on industry buzz, implemented to the best of your ability, no return on investment will be seen and the whole idea of ‘online marketing’ will be dismissed as ineffective. This frustrates us here at Maximum Net Gain because we know that a well planned holistic online marketing strategy will lead to huge returns on your investment for years to come.

The Online Marketing Jigsaw