Elements of an Optimal Interactive Marketing Strategy

The elements of a good 2.0 interactive marketing strategy can be expressed as:

1) Targeted content
2) Distribution to the right channel(s).

The first step is gathering the data that will inform you about how to target your content.

Understanding how consumers use the web in general and your site in particular is key to your strategy.

Creating targeted messaging based on that understanding is an iterative process best guided by a analytics package. Analytics software has become much more intuitive to navigate over the last two to three years and should be considered foundational to any interactive marketing strategy.

The next step is to segment your audience. The more specifically you can identify your audience segments, the better your messaging will work to bring in the results you’re looking for.

Once you have identified basic characteristics of your audience segments, create a persona for each that you can get to “know” over time.

Your strategy for creating targeted content will be based on the personas you’ve created. This is where it helps to have a good interactive marketing strategist on board.

One option would be to optimize and target content manually for each person. This is manageable if you have only one or two people and clearly defined areas of your site that they’re likely to visit.

For multiple person, setting up a personalization engine will make optimizing your messaging for each much more manageable. Using your analytics data and hypotheses on how each person will interact on the site and off, your strategist can set up business rules within the personalization engine that will serve up a different experience to each audience segment.

The interactive content you create will be individualized to meet the needs of each segment.

Content might include RSS news feeds, audio and/or video podcasts, webinars, product demos, interactive tools, white papers, blogs or articles.

An effort should be made to see that these pieces of content get cataloged by external news
aggregators, industry-specific directories and search engines.

Search engine optimization (SEO) of your site and its content will increase the chances that your
content will be indexed by aggregators, directories and search engines.

Providing ways for consumers to interact, personalize and author their own experience of your site if possible is an ideal way to let them contribute to the personalization process and collect data on how they best like to use your site.

Creating an effective interactive marketing strategy that meets the needs of the Web 2.0
audience takes into account each of these elements.

The good news is that, aside from a few niche industries, not many businesses online are doing it as well as they could be.