All businesses and organisations work in their own ways, and serve different markets with different goods and services, but they have at least one thing in common: a need to make their marketing budget work as effectively as possible. Your existing marketing mix may include: your own printed materials; trade, national and local newspaper advertising; direct mail and/or email campaigns. Embracing internet marketing can add a whole new range of channels: websites, search engine advertising, email campaigns, social media and much more. But the continuing responsibility of marketing budget holders is to balance spending in these areas to maximise effectiveness.
The percentage of your business that comes directly from websites or email campaigns will vary from one sector to another. A business selling goods online, for example, should make every effort (through email campaigns, search engine advertising and integrated use of social media) to drive as much traffic as possible to the website, as cost of sales online may well be substantially lower. The context may be very different for a consultancy, where the role of a website or an email campaign is more likely to focus on establishing brand positioning and values, making the latest news, offers and service details available as quickly as possible, providing information about services and including calls to action that encourage – and make it easy – for web site visitors – to make contact with appropriate points within the business.
