What is the best way to boost your websites ROI (Return On Investment)? Making use of all the Online Marketing channels is!

“Although it is easy to start a multi-channel online marketing campaign, what is often overlooked is how the different channels affect each other, you can increase the overall efficiency of your campaign by integrating everything better.“

Search Engine Optimisation Strategy
SEO should be your core strategy for online marketing. Every other channel fits around it. SEO works harder and more efficiently than most channels, and on a (potentially) much larger scale too. This is your cheapest form of customer acquisition long term, and you need to ensure that even if it doesn’t generate huge amounts of revenue, it has more potential than any other channel; so stick with it and be patient.

• A strategy based around SEO will be less expensive than a PPC based strategy
• Invest in SEO consultancy as early on in the development of your website as possible
• SEO Return on Investment (ROI) should be considered differently to other channels because the SEO work you do on your site will continue to be effective over a long period of time. The initial SEO consultancy work done on your site could still be bringing in visitors and revenue years later.

Paid Search Strategy
PPC (Pay per Click) should be used to fill in the gaps where SEO visibility is limited. These keyword areas can be targeted long term as a part of an ongoing SEO strategy. This will allow you to reduce PPC budget once SEO visibility is attained. If PPC is too expensive in these areas, consider working with Affiliates on a CPA deal so you are paying commission only for paying visitors. This will be easier to control cost and ensure there is ROI.

• PPC should be used for very quick turnaround deals or offers
• PPC is great for reactive marketing

Affiliate marketing strategy
If you have affiliates at your disposal, you should consider how they fit in the overall strategy. You need to be absolutely certain that affiliates are driving quality traffic to your site. Be aware that some affiliates use underhand tactics to make them appear better.

Display Advertising Strategy
Display advertising should be used to build or reinforce your brand and service/product offering. Brand searches are the ones you want. People searching “Ipods” are not going to be tempted with another mp3 player because of the strength of the brand. By building up your brand using targeted display ads, you are creating a need for your product/service. As long as you make it clear in the advert what your product/service is called, users can search for it later (post impression). Your natural search results will now pick up these searches. Always make sure you rank at #1 (on SEO) for the message on your display ads, you can capitalise on searchers looking for your product (or brand) after seeing the display advert.

• Display campaigns should drive users to search for your brand and products
• Your dominant SEO positions will pick up traffic for these searches
• Dynamic XML driven display ads that update prices/offers via database can support PPC deal campaigns, so your prices remain consistent on every channel

Online Customer Retention Strategy and brand protection
To ensure you keep in touch with existing customers and they remember your brand and product, use email and RSS. You can then keep them informed of new deals and products. Existing customers should be prompted to subscribe to the RSS deals feed and email list. A personalised email should be sent out after purchase to ensure customers are happy with the product. If customer is happy, invite them to feedback on their experiences (on your forum, blog or customer review area), if the customer is not happy, customer support should take over (the customer should not be invited to feedback yet, you are not finished trying to solve their problem!).

Emails collected should be used to send personalised deals to the customer. The frequency of this email will depend on the kind of product you are selling (high value item sold once a year or low value commodity items sold weekly?). Getting this frequency right is vital, otherwise your marketing efforts will become white noise and the consumer will ignore your emails! An RSS deals feed should be setup to allow users to take a look at deals when they want, as this is a less intrusive medium than email. Regularly emailing users masses of deals won’t get a response from customers, but if they have the facility to see a list of all deals when they want to, you give the user the choice (rather than bombarding them with untargeted emails).

Social Networking Strategy
Twitter, Facebook, Digg and all the other Social Networking Sites can be a great way to engage with existing and potential customers. Bear in mind that while browsing these sites, users are not in purchase mode, they are having fun with friends and messaging others. They will be less receptive to sales messages so you should look to engage users instead.

You will need to investigate how people use these websites and what you can do to capitalise (or control) the outcome. Here are a few suggestions:

• People use Twitter to complain about products and services. Reply to them, apologise and put them in touch with customer services
• Design and make a cool gadget with the intention of it going viral on Digg etc. What about an animated service selector? A user generated photo gallery of people using your product? A random product generator?
• Start a fanpage or a group for your product on Facebook. Obviously, fun, quirky or incredible products and services work best. Remember, a user on a social networking site will not be compelled to read about a dishwasher on here, so be selective! It has to be fun!

As a starting point this guide should provide a decent idea of what to keep an eye on and how the marketing channels affect one another. Getting the channels working together will make your online marketing campaign worth more than the sum of its parts!