Online marketing can be daunting for marketers and companies that haven't had much exposure to it in the past. It's a complex, fast-moving field, and it's easy to neglect some of the finer details when you're planning your strategy.

What follows is a list of questions that will help guide your online marketing campaign strategy. This is by no means a rigid and thorough checklist, but simply a few guidelines that may help you crystallise your online goals as well as the ways that they can be achieved.

You may find it useful to discuss these questions and their answers with your online media planning and buying agency; indeed, your agency may ask you many of these questions without being prompted.

Goals and benchmarks

• What are your aims for the campaign - branding or customer conversion? How do the aims of your campaign align with the broader marketing and business strategy in your organisation?

• What do you want customers to do once they've seen your ad? To click through to your website and read some information? To sign up for a newsletter, fill in an application or make a purchase? Or do you simply want customers to remember the name of your company the next time they're at the shopping mall? How are these outcomes aligned with the goals of your campaign?

• What benchmarks will help you to understand how successful you were in achieving these aims? Clickthroughs, cost, leads, purchases, customer registration, page views, or brand recognition? Do you have historical data to benchmark against?

• What systems and processes do you have in place for tracking and reporting online and offline customer activity such as sales and enquiries? Can you link online campaigns to offline activities such as sales through your call centres and branches?

Previous online experience

• Has your company conducted much online marketing in the past? If not, why not? What are your expectations from online marketing?

• How well developed is your company's web presence? Are you conducting transactions and interacting with your customers online, or do you only have a static informational website?

• If you have conducted online marketing and advertising, what worked before? What didn't deliver on your expectations and where do you believe it went wrong?

Human resources and vendors

• What do you need your external online media agency to do for you? What do you want to do in-house and what would be better left in the hands of a specialist service provider?

• If you are already in a partnership with an external media agency, which elements of the relationship are working for you and which aren't? What do you believe the role of your agency to be and what would you like the agency to do over and above the basics of planning and buying?

• How do you gauge the quality of your agency and the service it is delivering?

• What training and support will your internal staff need to help you achieve your online marketing goals?

Your audience

• Who is your target audience? Be as specific as possible about the demographics of your audience and link each product or service offering you wish to market online to a target market.

• Draw up profiles of your best customers, your worst customers and your average customer to understand what each of them has in common.

• What buying patterns do you see in your customer base? Is there a time of the week, month or year that your customers are particularly active?

The creative

• What are the benefits of your products to the target audience? What makes your products different from those your competitors offer? Craft a concise sentence or paragraph for each product to help design compelling creative.

• What sort of messaging and creative has worked for you in the past? If you haven't advertised online much to date, what messaging is effective in offline media?

The media

• What media do you use for offline advertising? Where are you seeing your best results? How do you see your online efforts complementing your offline marketing?

• Which online media do you believe to be appropriate for your brand, and why? Which media properties do you not want your brand to be associated with and why?

Closing words

Before you can arrive at the correct answers for your online marketing strategy, you need to be asking the right questions. We find it helpful to revisit these questions regularly - throughout the duration of a campaign or whenever a new campaign is launched - because the market is so fluid that the answers shouldn't be taken for granted.