When starting a business, a good place to start is a business plan. A subset of that would be a marketing plan. And a subset of the marketing plan would be your Internet marketing plan. You could fill up dozens of pages on an Internet marketing plan because there are so many things you can do and it could be an integral part of your success.
When we take on a new client, we develop a comprehensive Internet marketing plan as a road map for the work we will be doing for them. Take a look at the elements you should include in your Internet marketing plan:
Market Overview
Do a general analysis the market you are in and how other people are marketing their products and services, even if it’s not on the Internet. Take a look at how people buy the product, how long the sale cycle is, and if there seems to be an untapped source of leads.
Target Market
Start putting together notes of what your typical buyer looks like and develop several personas. Here is an outline of what you should write out about each persona:
- Name
- How old are they
- Where do they live
- What is their job title
- Why would this person look for a company like yours
- What things are important to this person before they make a financial decision.
- What does this person want to see on the site
They don’t have to be actual people but it can be helpful to think about your current clients if you have them already. You don’t have to create a dozens of personas, but it’s good to have representatives from each type of client you have. The use of personas will help you determine the design, content and calls to action on your site.
Competition Analysis
Determine your top three competitors and explore what they are doing on their site. Evaluate what you think they are doing well, what you think they’re doing poorly, and how effective you think their web site is. It is here that you can start pulling together the best elements of these other sites to incorporate into your site.
Comprehensive Site Analysis
This is where you get brutally honest with your site. Take a look at the design, navigation, content and calls to action on your site. It would probably be helpful to have a trusted friend or partner give you feedback as well. And you could even ask your clients what they think of your site and what they would want on it. And if you can afford it, talk to an Internet marketing firm and get their input on what they think would improve your site. You could just pay for a couple hours of consulting if you aren’t ready to have another company do your online marketing.
Online Marketing Strategy Recommendation
Using this book and other research you’ve done, start mapping out your Internet strategy. Here some things to put here:
- Organic search engine optimization
- Paid search (pay per click advertising)
- Email marketing
- Online press releases
- Blogging
- Article submissions
Complementary Offline Strategies
You can integrate your online and offline marketing strategies. Offline strategies would include print advertising, yellow pages, direct marketing, and networking. You can use all of these to send people to your site, and to develop your email marketing list.
Timeline
Put together a schedule of target dates and priorities for the planning, designing, and implementation of your Internet marketing plan. You can’t do everything all at once so you need to figure out what most important to begin with.
Web Statistics Set-Up
A good web statistics program allows you to see how many visitors are getting to your site, where they are coming from, and what they are doing once they get there. This allows you to make wise decisions about the direction of your site and to fix things that aren’t working too well.
Ongoing Work
This where you actually do the work that you scheduled out in your timeline. You and your team can start doing the things that will benefit your entire Internet marketing strategy.