The work of an internet marketing specialist covers many aspects in order to give a business the best marketing campaign possible. With the advent of online marketing thousands of people claim to be a specialist and they will do an ‘awesome’ job for you. The problem is that many of these ‘specialists’ are not specialists at all. They are just someone with an idea who is trying to make a few dollars very quickly.
In order to find the right marketing specialist for you there are a few things that you need to do.
Be able to work with them
You can work closely with the marketing specialist and organise exactly what you expect them to do and they will tell you exactly how they are going to set about producing results. While talking about SEO and keywords and technical analyses is good, will they make their work attract customers and make the web site about people and not just statistics?
The marketing campaigns need to be modern and creative to make a searcher visit your web site and you can have as much input as you need. The marketing specialist should want your input for the type of things you want them to do for you. They should be able to help you with blogs, site content, news releases and make sure it fits in with all of the search engine protocols.
Take advantage of a free trial and talk to as many as you can
You need to talk to these people and often the best place to start can be a free trial of services. If they won’t offer a free trial at least find out what they are prepared to do for the amount of money you are giving them. The more ideas they offer and tell you about first off will give you an idea of the kind of work they can do.
If the first one you talk to can’t tell you much don’t bother them and check out others. Or better still; ask around to see if anyone can be recommended by friends or business acquaintances. There is nothing like word of mouth to get the right person for a job.
What have they done lately?
Always ask to see recent work and their portfolio of completed or ongoing work. If they have been providing an excellent service they will be happy to let you contact previous clients to talk about their work. If they are unable to offer any previous clients, look for another specialist. Anyone worth his credentials should have a client base no matter how short a time they have been working, or will have someone to vouch for them if they are just starting out.
The customer must come first
The marketing specialist needs to be able to listen to you and understand what your needs for success is and how you want to interact with the customers. If all they can talk about is SEO, technical data and statistics ask them how the customer will react to the marketing ploys. If they can’t tell you or don’t consider the customer a very important part of internet marketing, see someone else.
The web site and pages they create for you must be appealing to your customers and make them first look at you for their products and services and then become buyers of your products and services.
Good analysis of results
Any specialist worth his salt will be able to produce reports from the results that will allow him or her to fine tune the campaigns to produce a better result. They will need to know what the numbers mean and how they relate back to converting searchers into customers. They should also be providing you with a clear pattern of increase in traffic to your site and other such figures so you can see exactly what the effect of their work has been.