September has been a month of conferences. First the Internet Marketing Conference, then Defining Success: Accountable Online Marketing for Book Publishing hosted by BookNet Canada and the Association of Book Publishers of BC, and this Friday

ExpressionEngine Roadshow.

As a speaker (and chatty soul) at each of these conferences, I have talked to a number of people struggling with the same question. How do you define a successful internet marketing campaign? Most understand why they want to be online but are having trouble showing success and getting budget dollars.

The first step is to dispel myths held by those gripping the pursue strings.

That means 23 million Canadians are online. 8 million are in Facebook. The numbers are huge!

1. Just because it is online, does not mean it is free.
   If you want successful internet marketing campaigns, you have to put money, people and time into them. Even using free tools, you still need to invest the time in using that tool properly.
    
2. People, process and technology.
   You do not have a successful campaign without all 3. The tools and technology are available to do really great things, but the tools are only as good as the people using them.
    
3. Plan. Measure. Improve.
   You cannot express success without agreed upon metrics.
   • As a company, you have to understand the cost of the campaign and the value generated. The cost is easy to measure. It is the assignment of value that we often overlook. How much do we value the new email subscriber, the new Facebook member. What do they mean to our business? How do we measure these indirect benefits across all campaigns so we know if the email newsletter is actually of greater value to the business than the blog or the twitter feed?
   • Sit down with your team and define the value of each marketing action (online and offline). Even set arbitrary numbers to use as a baseline until you have historical data.
      

4. Internet Marketing Is Hard and Only for Kids.

   Internet marketing is not hard. Doing things you have never done before is hard.
    

   Solutions Research Group produced a report last June (2007) to
   show the age groups of Canadians visiting social networking sites: places like Facebook and MySpace.
    

   • 70 percent of 12-19 year olds visited a social networking site within the last month.
   • 72 percent of 20-29 year olds
   • 44 percent of 30-49
   • 29 percent of 50+