The Five Fundamentals of Successful Internet Marketing

	Traffic, conversion, testing, measurement and communication are five online marketing fundamentals covered in Brian Offenberger's July 16th webinar.

In SEMA's July 16 webinar presentation, Brian Offenberger, CEO of the Aftermarketer Club, shared the five fundamentals for success with Internet marketing.

Five Fundamentals for Success

1. Drive qualified traffic in sufficient, steady reliable quantities: Offenberger says that driving traffic from multiple resources to your website is a must. Getting traffic from Google is the most well-known way to drive traffic, but Offenberger suggests other avenues, such as groups like MySEMA, press releases, articles, web videos and related websites.
   
   “What you are looking for is to have five or more consistent ways for you to generate traffic for your website," said Offenberger. You can also generate traffic through offline sources, such as business cards, service tickets, your vehicles and signage in your store.
2. Process to convert website traffic into leads and sales: Once you have established how to get traffic, now you need to have a process that converts visitors into either leads or sales. You want visitors to come to your web page and either buy something from you or contact you for follow up.
   
   "Make sure that your website gives your customers specific reasons to spend with you versus someone else," said Offenberger. He also says that your site needs a call to action to get visitors to engage and buy from you. There are a wealth of additional suggestions and tips for this step that are outlined in the entire presentation.
3. Testing to find out what works best: Not everything works well right out of the gate, and you test to find out what works best. Sometimes, one thing that changes can have a profound impact on the results in a major way. What do you test? Basic things first: picture, headlines and pricing offers.
4. Measurement and analytics for understanding and action: Measuring and using analytics allows you to understand website-visitor behaviors and intentions—you’ll learn what search terms, engines, or links that brought people to your website; how they move throughout your website; and the web pages they started with. This information is valuable when making business decisions. Google will give you the free program—Google Analytics—to use.
5. Communication to increase customer value: Offenberger says that companies communicate with prospects and customers at regular intervals in a systematic fashion so they purchase more from us for longer periods of time, while reducing our cost-of sales, customer-retention costs and operating costs.
   
   Offenberger stated: “You have people that come to your site who are not ready to buy. You need to have a system in place to talk to them at regular intervals until they are ready to buy. You have people who have bought from you; you need to have a system in place so they will continue to buy from you. Some of you sell products that customers consume, you want them to consume the goods more frequently so they will buy from you more often.”

The presentation also covered common terms used in Internet marketing, the basics of a good website and how to identify and hire a good web designer for your company. Download the entire presentation, “Introduction to Internet Marketing”.

Offenberger’s presentation is one in a series of webinars covering the importance of effective and successful Internet marketing. Register for the next presentation in the series, “Online Marketing Tools You Need Now,” August 6, 10:00 a.m.–11:00 a.m. (PST).

For more on SEMA’s webinar program, visit www.sema.org/webinars.