When was the Last Time You Reviewed Your Internet Strategy?

by Sherry Heyl, Chief Strategy Officer

I am guessing you have a website and that is good.  I am guessing you worked diligently on what the colors should be, the layout, and content that expressed your offerings, solutions, and passions.

Being a smart business person you realized that you have to have some sort of marketing campaign to drive people to your site, so you optimized the site to rank high in search engines. You probably even extended your Internet Marketing strategy to include effective email campaigns.

Have you added multimedia?

Video is huge lately. It seems to be everywhere. Online video strategy alone can require lots of brainstorming, research, writing, storyboarding, scrapping, and starting over again. What kind of video will resonate best with your audience? A talking head? A high energy, high impact professional production? Or something that was caught with a camcorder or webcam?

How should your video be distributed? Email? Website? Within an Interactive Player? Through Social Networks such as BlipTV, YouTube, Revver, Google, MySpace, etc?

What about Podcasting? That seems simple enough. It's a hot trend and there are lots of benefits. So, again, what is your story that will resonate with your audience? How long should it be? What do you want them to get from the podcast? How should it be distributed? Can it be integrated into other marketing efforts.

What is your strategy to go where your audience is? Are you active in forums? Blogs? Social Networks?

Are your competitors? Are your customers?

Have you read through any relevant review sites recently? 

What is everyone saying out there anyway? Are they talking about you? Your industry? The problems that you have solutions for?

Are your employees talking about their jobs? Are they answering questions about the company?

When was the last time you checked Wikipedia or for that matter added your expertise to Wikipedia? When one of the almost 40% of Americans go to Wikipedia to get information they think is credible, are they finding you there?

Are you getting up to speed on the growing trends of Widgets, Mashups, Mobile Marketing or Virtual Worlds?

Wait! Let's get back to your website. Have you considered;

Dynamic Navigation

Personalization

Cross Linking

Distributable Content

The Ability to Integrate other Communities onto the Sites

Actually should you develop your own community as opposed to a website?

The World Wide Web has become a very complex place to do business. It is the Global Interconnected  Marketplace where we all go to either network, research, or make transactions.

It is time to ask yourself, is your Internet Strategy Creating Your Competitive Edge?