CRITICAL SUCCESS FOR INTERNET MARKETING

CRITICAL SUCCESS FACTORS FOR INTERNET MARKETING EXECUTIVES

Marketers have always been in the business of anticipating and managing change, and technology has been their principle tool for managing it. The Internet presents an adaptive challenge for the marketing executive. Today’s Internet marketing exec-utive must have all the traditional skills of the offline marketing professional, but must place extra emphasis on some of them to account for the new economy. These critical new skills include customer advocacy and insight, integration, balanced thinking, and a willingness to accept risk and ambiguity.

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Customer Advocacy and Insight

An insatiable curiosity for customers and marketplaces is a bare necessity for today’s marketing professional. This innate curiosity fuels an individual’s desire to transform mounds of customer data into meaningful and actionable insights, which in turn become a platform for advocacy. Because the Internet enables a much greater degree of interaction with customers, designing and promoting these interactions around customers’ needs and progressively gaining deeper insights are critical components of creating positive customer experience. A true customer advocate will be looking to provide demonstrable added value to each customer interaction to form the basis for a meaningful relationship. As both cus-tomer behaviors and enabling technologies simultaneously evolve, a deep understanding of customer needs should serve as the guidepost driving marketing deci-sions. Marketing professionals will need to strategically collect information from many disparate sources, create insightful customer mosaics, and effectively trans-late them into marketing strategies and tactics.

Integration

The Internet represents both a new channel and a new communications medium. The new-economy marketing professional needs to have an integrated or’ holistic view of the customer and the enterprise in order to create a uniquely advantaged strategic plan. In today’s multi channel environment, a consistent message and experience must be maintained across customer touch points in order to create a consistent brand image. Beyond strategy, a marketing manager must fundamentally understand how to integrate these new tools into the overall marketing mix. Managers who are able to hone their marketing plan in a highly integrated fashion are more likely to capitalize on the synergies between marketing elements and thus drive greater effectiveness.

Balanced Thinking

An Internet marketing professional needs to be highly analytical and very creative. Culling specific customer insights from a veritable fire hose of data is critically important for new-economy managers. It requires understanding the dynamic ten-sion between one-to-one marketing and mass marketing and being able to strike a strategic balance between them. It also requires determining the appropriate cus-tomer data requirements. Internet marketing professionals must also be technolog-ically savvy. Understanding the strategic and tactical implications of the Internet, leveraging the rapid learning environment and accelerated decision-making process it creates, and then creatively applying the insights gleaned from analysis are critical success factors for all Internet marketing professionals.

Passion and Entrepreneurial Spirit

Although very hard to objectively assess, passion, or fire in the belly, is what will dif-ferentiate leaders from followers in the new economy. Trying to change the status quo is never easy, and only people with conviction and passion will be heard over the din of the inevitable naysayers. Successful marketing managers use this passion to fuel their entrepreneurial instincts and vision, creating “bleeding edge” tools as they lead their teams to success.

Willingness to Accept Risk and Ambiguity

In the new economy, Internet marketing professionals need to retool them-selves and their companies to enter into a whole new era of customer-centric marketing. The Internet has enabled customers to have much more informa-tion and many more choices than ever before, thus shifting the balance of power toward the customer and creating the need for a whole new set of “pull” -based marketing tools. Successful Internet professionals need to rely on a whole new set of marketing tools that work in an extraordinarily dynamic environ-ment.
Having the courage to try new things is the key to developing break-through Internet marketing. The risk and ambiguity of managing in such uncharted territory is tremendous, and the most successful Internet marketers will be willing to play at the edges.

Today’s online marketing professionals must have the basic skill set of the offline marketing professional. But they must also react more quickly and manage more information and channels in order to stay one step ahead of the competition. The skill set has not changed tremendously, but-the tools need to be applied with more vigor and sometimes with greater speed. Successful

Internet marketers will build their business models and value propositions around a deep understanding of cus-tomer needs-not around the product.