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Creating an Internet Marketing Plan is a great way to refine the focus of your online efforts. Use this process get a steady flow of leads and sales from your online marketing activities.
Step One: Define Your Purpose for Being Online
What are your key objectives for your Internet presence?
Your key objective could be to:
- Generate leads for new business
- Sell a product or service
- Keep existing customers (or members) informed
- Make product and/or customer service information available
- Attract visitors and sell advertising
- Build a community
- Sell memberships, etc
Step Two: Define Your Target Audience and Their Information Needs
If you have an existing Web site, look at your Web traffic reports. Some reports will give you an idea of the:
- pages your visitors visit most frequently
- pages they leave immediately (pages with the highest bounce rates)
- origin of most of your visitors (by country for example)
Web site traffic data gives you an idea of how engaged your visitors are with the content on your site.
If you do not have a good Web site stats package, install Google Analytics.
 If you need help getting the most out of your Google Analytics, we Recommend the following books:
For beginners, we suggest: Google Analytics, 3rd Edition by Jerri L. Ledford
For more experienced users, we suggest: Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics by Brian Clifton
For review of all of our reommended books, visit our Internet marketing resources page.
If your Web site gets enough visits, you can learn more about your visitors with third party tools such as quantcast.com.
If you do not yet have a Web site, interview your best customers or your potential customers. No matter your audience, think about your target group’s decision process.
If you want to build community, you will want to know the type of information your target audience is seeking.
If you sell a complex product with long sales cycle, review your prospect’s buying process. Buyers of complex products and services need different information at each step in their buying process. For example, early stage prospects need general information. Later stage prospects want vendor and/or product reviews.
Step Three: Conduct Keyword Research and Set Your Keyword Focus
Keyword research is the heart and soul of successful Internet marketing.
Since Google gets the lion’s share of the search market. You can use Google’s external keyword tool to conduct basic keyword research. https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
This tool shows the number of searches and volume of advertisers for each keyword within Google’s system. You can see how many Web sites target a specific keyword by conducting a phrase match search (search with the “keyword phrase” in quotes) and look at the number of Web sites listed in the Results section of the Google tool bar.
For example conduct a search on “Internet Marketing Specialists” in Google and you’ll notice around 40,000 Web sites target this phrase. Also notice that Google ranks marketwise.net in the top 10 on the search results page.
Need more help with keyword research, subscribe to one of the top two keyword research tools (Keyword Discovery or Wordtracker). If you want to hire a firm to do this research for you, contact us.
Based on the number of searches and competitors, select your keyword “sweet spot”. You’ll want to focus on keywords that are popular and relevant and those that have the least competition.
How will you use the keyword “sweet spot”? Use those keywords in the tactics you select. Examples: in an SEO campaign –develop pages with your keyword focus in mind; in article marketing –write an article focused on your keyword phrase, etc.
Step Four: How are you going to spread your message online?
After you define your objective, your target audience and their information needs, you are ready to think about tactics. How are you going to spread your message online? You can use a combination of the following:
- Writing articles/white papers (learn more in our online pr section)
- Offering free reports or e-books (learn more in our online pr section)
- Publishing E-newsletters (learn more in our e-newsletter section)
- Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising (learn more in our section on PPC)
- Launching a SEO initiative (learn more in our section on SEO)
- Hosting a Forum or Blog
- Reaching out to the top bloggers in your industry
- Running contests
- Conducting a viral marketing program (YouTube contest for example)
- Using social media (twitter, facebook, LinkedIn, etc.)
You should choose your tactics based on your target market’s profile, your budget and your timing needs.
Examples:
If you need leads right away, PPC shows results quickly (but costs money).
If you can wait awhile, SEO will not cost money, if you can do this in-house. SEO will take staff time to implement and weeks or months to show results.
We often recommend starting with a small PPC campaign to test market response. Based on the results, you can then launch a more time-consuming SEO project.
Step Five: Develop your timeline and set success goals for your selected tactics
For more information on selecting and implementing the right tactics, we recommend the following book:
 Search Engine Optimization: Your Visual Blueprint for Effective Internet Marketing by Kristopher B. Jones
Don’t let the title fool you. This book covers much more than SEO. It covers all aspects of marketing a business on the Internet and is written by one of the most respected Internet marketing gurus in the industry.
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