A proper Internet marketing plan will introduce you to both online and offline customers. If you already have a short-term or long-term business plan drafted, you can include a good Internet marketing plan in your marketing strategy.
Below are the steps for creating your own Internet marketing plan:
Purpose of Internet marketing:
Answer these questions: Do you want to embark on Internet marketing to provide services to existing clients or to find new clients? Or are you interested in creating a new online community to address your prospective customers?
Have you allocated any money to be spent on internet marketing this month?
Competition:
Understand your position among your competitors. Are they already in the Internet marketing arena? Keep track of your competitors’ websites and online activities.
Find out what’s special in their online offerings. Observe the gaps in their offerings, which will help you to chart your own plan.
The marketing filter:
Successful online businesses have a well-laid-out filtering process for their marketing initiatives. Think of it in terms of a triangle. The top of the triangle begins with low-cost offerings given as freebies or free samples.
As the triangle widens, you’ll need to make additional investment in your products. By establishing price points on the triangle, you can create a tool for observing what affects the sale of your products and services at different price points.
The target market:
Locate a clearly-definable target market that you can easily control and capture. Get into the finer details of the market’s dynamics.
Find out more about your target audience’s socioeconomic status, age, sex, lifestyle, contacts, likes and dislikes, and other details. Doing this will help you to market your products and services more effectively.
Figuring out solutions:
You need to devise a specific solution for each specific problem. Solutions should be simple, but should differ from those of your competitors in an easily identifiable way.
Branding:
Choose a domain name that is unique and easy to recall, but also in tune with your line of business. It should be catchy enough to be converted into a brand. The design of your site should be simple yet effective.
Website:
The visual appeal and functionality of your website must be good enough to attract the right audience. Your website’s content should be crisp and to the point and should address the problems of the visitors. You must list all the benefits of your products and services, rather than simply emphasizing product features.
Also, you should ask your clients to register on your site or subscribe to your company’s newsletter (you do have one, don’t you?). That way you can collect the addresses of your visitors and you’ll be able to count the number of visitors that come to your site on a daily basis.
Make very certain that any download links work properly.
Strategies to pull traffic toward your website:
With the help of pay-for-click purchases, organic search-engine listings, publishing and uploading of content on a regular basis, and exchange of links with other industries having the same business targets, you can increase the traffic to your site.
Last but not least, you need to build a good team of Internet professionals to design and run your site according to your Internet marketing plan.
