Your company has a Facebook page, a dedicated Tweeter for your Twitter account, and you just contracted someone to develop an iPhone app. So who needs a marketing plan when you’re plugged into all the silver bullets of online marketing?!

You do.

You may believe that social networking and iPhone applications that reach your customers are all you need in your marketing plan (hey, Pepsi, you guys doing alright?) but this is not the case. If you’re a frequent reader of The EGC Group newsletter, you know we feel strongly about the importance of making sure your online marketing tactics are more than just tactics, that they are part of a comprehensive, researched integrated marketing plan that combines online media with offline media.

And these online “silver bullets” are not an exception to that rule.

The fact is, the tested and true rules of traditional marketing DO apply to online marketing. The most important rule to follow is that the first step in developing any plan is to make sure the tactics in it are right for your brand. As you would if you were going to produce a TV commercial and buy thousands or millions of dollars of ad inventory on TV, you need to make reasoned, researched, informed decisions about your online marketing buys. You need a strategy that goes beyond “everyone is doing it, so it’s the price of doing business.” Are Facebook and Twitter right for your brand? More importantly—are you sending the right message to your customers by being there? And most importantly—are your customers even there, listening? Do they care, or are you wasting your time?

At The EGC Group, everything we do, plan and develop is informed by some kind of research, including our digital strategy. We research your customers to find out where they are and what to say to them once we find them. Yes, one of the benefits of online marketing over offline is its measurability—it’s easier to know where to find your target customer online than off. And it’s easier to change course if the people we start talking to aren’t the right fit, or aren’t responding to the message. But if you don’t know what to say to them when you find them and start talking, and if it doesn’t communicate your brand in the right way, what’s the point?

Every brand, every client, every campaign—they’re all different. That is why there is no online marketing silver bullet. While we may begin with a plan built around obvious and tested tactics—display ads, search, social media—I assure you that before the campaign has run its planned course (and with the flexibility of online it may be by the end of the day! The hour!) the plan will change. It will be optimized to put dollars and resources toward what is working and eliminate what isn’t. We may find that social networking may not be a good fit for your brand if your customers aren’t there. But we’ll never know if we don’t test it.

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