The one question that most often goes unanswered regarding interactive strategy is also the most obvious, and most important, one – What do we want to accomplish?  While it seems like an easy question, brands should invest some real time and thought into the answer.

When determining goals for your interactive marketing strategy, consider the following questions in detail:

• What are your overall business goals?
• How does your current Web presence reflect these goals?
• What metric(s) will determine success for your interactive marketing efforts?

While your brand will likely identify multiple goals for interactive marketing, you should decide upon a primary goal that becomes the benchmark for success.  Unless your business goal is generating ad based revenue, your primary goal is most likely not increasing the number of visitors to your site.  Depending on your current brand positioning and business model, your goal may be increasing brand awareness, identifying brand advocates, increasing online sales, increasing leads, or increasing customer loyalty.

Your secondary goals should be even more specific.  Determine how you want to interact with you audience online.  If there are specific actions that your audience can perform to show the desired interaction, what are those actions?

An accurate understanding of your goals does more than start your strategy off on the right foot; it also provides the benchmark for refinement throughout the execution of that strategy.

As a follow-up to our Podcast discussing the value of an Interactive Competitive Analysis, I wanted to discuss the efforts that go into the process of performing a interactive competitive analysis?  There’s no mystery involved, just a lot of research, tracking, and evaluation.

Hundreds of hours of research and preparation, in fact, can go into a comprehensive competitive analysis.  The work involved touches on the functionality, usability, popularity, and availability of a brand and its competitors’ websites.

A deep dig is done to these websites.  Everything ranging from site traffic, visitor demographics, and site messaging to site content, site programming, and site tools and usability are examined.  This wide range of information is then pooled together to gain a full sense of each website’s good and bad elements.

The interactive marketing efforts of a brand’s competition is making are also explored, including key terms, search engine ranking, keyword buys, social media efforts, banner ads, and specific campaigns.  A variety of tools are utilized to analyze results of competitor efforts and benchmark the interactive advertising of our brand.

After compiling a massive amount of data, rankings are developed for best practices for the brand’s industry, determining for a series of categories which of the competitors are ahead of the pack and explaining why.

The entire competitive analysis process has a huge impact on interactive marketing strategy.  All the angles are examined to determine the best direction for a brand’s interactive marketing strategy to take.  A competitive analysis is able to take a full and objective view of the brand and its industry as a whole, enabling the big picture to come into focus more clearly.

Keep in mind that this is competitive analysis, not competitive guesswork.  While branding is analyzed subjectively, an objective review can determine, for example, if a competitor’s site tools work.  The performance of the competition’s advertising efforts can also be objectively tracked to determine if these campaigns are good or bad, effective or not.

Once the final analysis is completed, the findings are presented to the brand.  After investing in an interactive competitive analysis, it is highly recommended that brands utilize the findings of a competitive analysis to guide their interactive marketing strategy.  Three key benefits highlight the importance of utilizing these findings:

• First, being competitive in the interactive marketing realm involves a major investment.  A competitive analysis helps make sure your budget is wisely spent.
• Second, there is no need to use resources to learn the lessons that have already been learned by others.  The key is to pattern your plan on a successful one and come up with a unique spin that is specific to your brand and not blatantly copying any existing campaign.  Originality counts.
• Third, for the brand’s interactive marketing agency, the competitive analysis helps it understand an industry’s best practices and what a brand’s competitors are doing and then use this to fuel the development of original creative ideas for the brand.

Join Alan Gilleo and Scott Million as they discuss the methodology and benefits of an Interactive Competitive Analysis.

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I’ve been absent from the hallowed halls of LFI headquarters for the last week while I was recovering from an emergency extraction of all four of my wisdom teeth. While recouping, I spent a lot of time on the Internet reading news, catching up on television, and bolstering my photography knowledge. The nice part about all of this was that I was able to do it without sitting at my desk. Between my laptop and my iPhone (and with the help of my wireless network), I was able to have access to all the information and entertainment my little mind could hope for. What an amazing time to be alive, eh?

So here we are, less than four days away from the July 11th launch of Apple’s iPhone 3G, which promises to bring the web into our hands even faster. The simple fact of the matter is that the iPhone really changed my life. No, like REALLY changed my life. At parties I am able to look up answers to obscure questions that get dropped in conversation (Is that really a valid rule for calling shotgun???), I can actually do crossword puzzles now, I never miss an e-mail, and I am able to make good use of time by using Google’s tools for iPhone to digest the web when I have only minutes to spare. I can honestly say that my iPhone makes it easy to spend less and less time chained to my desk to keep up with e-mail, news, and other information. Put simply, the iPhone has made the Internet pervasive in mine and so many other people’s lives.

Chrysler’s announcement that they will offer optional in-car WiFi on all 2009 models is another sign that pervasive Internet is right over the horizon. Pervasive Internet… Think about that for a moment. The Internet, everywhere. Just providing web access to our information isn’t good enough yet. Web applications are going to get smarter about where we are and what we’re doing. Imagine GPSs that can sample driving speeds and in real time report over the Internet about traffic conditions on every road while other GPSs recommend alternative routes around congestion for drivers headed in that direction. Imagine being able to retrieve movies or music for your consuming pleasure in real time on your car stereo, your mobile phone, or even your wristwatch whenever the mood hits you! What if you were looking to meet someone in a crowded environment like a football stadium? Your mobile phones could help you find one another. Your car could schedule itself for maintenance because it’s able to check your personal calendar and make all the arrangements for you. Ultimately, information exchange benefits by gaining the new dimension of location with pervasive Internet access.

This is truly an exciting time to be someone who gets to work with these new technologies! Our client requests will grow beyond getting a brand message or functional application to the web. In the coming decade, we will have our clients ask us to create POP apps for their retail chains to alert customers to where stock is for their size/style preferences. In fact, we may start referring to “the web” as something from the “old days” of the Internet. The Internet will be far more than a place where pages are accessed. It is becoming media. It is becoming a service. It is becoming the greatest thing since sliced bread!