One of the hardest things for any internet marketer is to figure out what to focus on. Marketing is overwhelmingly broad and you could pretty much do 10000 different things. How to set internet marketing goals and objectives? What’s most important? Answer: building marketing assets.
What are marketing assets? The terminology was created by Seth Godin, who talked about marketing assets here. In his words:
For a marketer, an asset is a tool or a platform, something you can use over and over without using it up. In fact, it’s something that gets better the more you invest.
Running an ad is an expense. Building a brand people trust is an asset.
Buying a trade show booth is an expense. Having a permission marketing list of people who want to get anticipated, personal and relevant emails from you is an asset.
The answer is right there. Your marketing goals and objectives should focus on building the following:
- building your reputation and brand,
- building your (permission based) mailing list and building the relationship with the people on that list,
- building your blog / Twitter / Facebook / etc audience, both in quality and quantity.
Now every time you have the question “what should I be doing?”, you can take action based on whether an activity helps you build a marketing asset or not.