Online Marketing Strategy Dubai – What is an online marketing strategy and do I need one?

Online Marketing Strategy Dubai? Does anyone out there know what I am taking about?

The short answer to the second part of that question – do you need one? – is yes, you do need one. 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 – what is an online marketing strategy Dubai? – 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 at 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?

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 we have been implementing many pieces of the online puzzle to create multiple revenue streams for ourselves, but during this learning process of thousands of hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars we have also been helping businesses to implement these strategies and increase their bottom line. We were 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 or in some cases, sub sections of whole pieces.
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 are 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? 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? We know a lot of people who have uttered those words recently and it pains us, because we 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 it 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

The above image is a snapshot of  what makes up an online marketing strategy. Dubai is the city we are located in but we provide services to companies all over the world. The way we have set up our company is based around the consultancy knowledge we now provide to other companies out there looking to establish or improve their online presence. As avid mind mappers and the fact that we, to steal a Microsoft phrase, ‘Dogfood’ (which means that we use the products and strategies we provide to others ourselves) we plan out exactly what we are aiming to do with not only this business but the numerous other online businesses we operate as MNG. We find that mind mapping is the easiest way to get all those ideas that float around in your head, out of your head and into a format that can be a) easily absorbed by the human brain and b) can be expanded on with ease. Having things in a graphical format makes it easier for us to actually internalise the information as it appears in a format that we as humans were designed to take on board. Making pages and pages of notes makes it harder to take the information on. What we also found is that you will often come back to something you have written earlier and want to expand on it – when it is on paper in written format, you have to then start writing in the margin or cross things out, or put the * and then start with your notes on a new page. It’s untidy and not conducive to producing a plan of action that can easily be turned into an executable set of tasks.

We made the move to Apple and so now use programs like Mindnode  as it’s Free and we can use it on the iMac, iPad and iPhone – but we also use iMindmap from Tony Buzan as well as MindManager from Mindjet. This was actually our favourite when we were a Windows based company.

If you would like to discuss how we can help you get more leads and revenue from your online presence, or you are seriously interested in creating an online marketing strategy (Dubai based for face to face) then give me a call on 0507198467 or drop us a line at strategy@maximumnetgain.com 

Here’s to your Maximum Net Gain!