How to Write an Effective Internet Marketing Plan

It doesn't matter if you're a one man show or a huge mutliglobal corporation. You need a plan. You at least need a general understanding of where you're going and who you're going after. If you don't know for sure or you're going after "everyone" you will fail.

If your target market is "anyone who wants to buy", I'm sorry to say you're not going to cut it online. You may make a few bucks, but having a definite plan and understanding of your landscape will be the difference between making several thousand per year and several hundred-thousand (or millions!) per year.

Step 1: Situation Analysis

Research the industry as a whole and understand what it needs and why it's there. What problem are people trying to solve from it? What kinds of buyers (and browsers) do you need to consider. What's your earning potential in the industry? If you can figure out how much money is spent online in this particular niche and what market share you could get with your marketing strategy and budget, you'll get an understanding of what your earning potential is.

This is also the step where you write your complete product description, its benefits and why your product is going to solve the problems buyers are trying to solve better than your competition.

You need to explore all the potential buyers you have in your particular niche. Are they old, young, male, female, caucasian, high income, low income, educated, not educated, do they shop at home or at work (online) and so on. How do they think? Where do they live? Get in their shoes and explain a typical day they live, their name, their family situation, the emotions they feel, the things they like and don't like, their major fears and so on.

This is called a persona. If you can spend 15 minutes creating a few good personas of your target groups, you will create a much stronger, personalized and relevant experience for them on your website once they get there. Remember - don't go after everyone. It's better to narrow it down to one or two core target groups and reach them effectively where they are going to be and speak to them in their language, the way they want to be spoken to and connected with. It's your job to make them feel you understand them and can help them solve their problems.

Step 2: Competitive Analysis

Look at your competition both online and off. Consider all elements that will take business away from you. If you're selling contemporary furniture through a boutique website, don't just consider the other contemporary websites selling similar products with boutique sites, but also physical stores where the buyer can sit on the furniture and get a real look and feel for the product. Also consider the clearance sites, the online market places and shopping comparison sites that have similar products but at a lower cost with possibly free or faster shipping. How do you compare? What are your value propositions that make buyers choose you over them?

At this step it's important to do a proper analysis of your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) so you can see how you compare to your competition and how you can beat them. Once you're able to identify how you can beat them, create your value propositions for your customers so they know why they should buy from you over someone else.

Step 3: Main Messaging and Positioning

In this section, once you've determined who your primary target groups are, defined your ideal personas (get into the heads of your buyers!), indentified your core competencies and developed your value propositions, create your main market messaging. This should be consistent with your branding (if already existent) and be targeted specifically to your core target groups. Speak in their language. Use words they would use. Make sure your messages are short, sweet and to the point. Most of all, make sure they are eye catching and are RELEVANT to your buyers.

Sometimes it takes a long time to figure out your perfect market messages. You might have to play around with them for a bit and test them on some target groups. Ask for feedback. Check with a branding or marketing expert to see if you're on the right track. But ultimately always remember your customer first. They will be the ones spending the money with you, so what you say and how you say it will be most important to them.

Step 4: Online Marketing Channel Strategy

This step is essential if you're going to succeed in the online space. This is where you do your research into each different marketing channel and identify your opportunities and limitations within each. You want to consider all available online channels to you and need to make sure you UNDERSTAND them well in order to determine your budget and placement within each. If you do not understand any of these channels to an "above average" or "excellent" level (be honest!) then I strongly recommend hiring a professional to help you:

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - how you will rank naturally in the major search engines

2. Pay Per Click Campaigns (such as Google Adwords) - paid placement in the most relevant search engines

3. Social Media Platforms and Network Sharing (Facebook / Twitter / Blogs / Forums) - what your presence be and how will you use it

4. Affiliate Marketing Program - leveraging an online sales force to drive targeted traffic to your website to increase sales

5. Shopping Engines / Marketplaces (such as Amazon, Google Product Search, etc) - product placement in the major shopping engines

6. Email - how will you connect and keep relationships before and after you've acquired a customer

7. Mobile - what devices do you need to be listed on if any and do you need an app or a site? How will you use it

8. Video (Youtube, Vimeo and even Facebook) - what visual messages are you going to associate with your website and brand to drive sales and engage with the community

9. Articles and Press Releases - what opportunity do you have to reach media, influential bloggers and customers directly with strategic article and press release distribution. How are you going to do it?

10. Your website itself. You can throw it up there and hope it works, or you can make it work by having a solid design, functional and easy to use navigation, great shopping features, back end analytics to understand your visitor behavior and conversion optimization tests to ensure you're always tweaking and improving the performance of your website for your primary target groups.

Make sure with each of these you do your keyword analysis and understand which major keyword groups and phrases you're going to go after. Again, hire a professional if you need help with this. It's ESSENTIAL to your online success.

Assuming you assess all these different channels (and possibly others outside of this list), understand how you will optimize each and how you will conduct a strategic roll out plan, you have to decide who and how you will launch and manage them effectively on an ongoing basis.

Whatever you decide are the best channels to launch in, it will be an ongoing effort to test, optimize and consistently improve ROIs. You can always pause, stop or relaunch campaigns in channels if they are not working well for you. You can outsource these efforts to experienced companies or individuals who know what they are doing. You can also launch and test them one at a time to make sure you're not spreading yourself too thin and are managing each as effectively as possible.

What's important to include in this step is a strong customer retention strategy. I put it in this step because customer retention can be a direct result of the efforts put forward in each of these sections and thus you must leverage each to keep customers around and coming back for more.

Customer retention is one of the most important sections to pay attention to. You can spend millions of dollars trying to bring in new customers, but if you lose them after their first purchase, you're eventually going to run out of funding and people to market to. Make sure that what you're doing has meaning and you have a plan to keep your converted customers around for as long as possible, bringing them back for more.

Step 5. Financial Analysis

In this section you will have a close and in-depth look at your sales projections, budgets and timelines. To figure out your sales projections, you look at the industry as a whole and figure out what market share you believe you will get with the plan you've outlined above and your budget. Now consider growth.

There are some important number combinations to consider in projecting your sales, which must include your average order value (AOV), website conversion rate, website traffic in number of visitors and possible repeat orders. Here's a quick example of how you would calculate your monthly sales:

January you have 25,000 visitors to your website, convert at 1%, have an AOV of $80 and 3% repurchase that same month:

25,000 (visitors) x 1% (conversion) x $80 (AOV) = $20,000
250 (first time buyers) x 3% (repeat buyers) x $80 (AOV) = $600

= January you're expected sales would be $20,600

Now assume in February your visitor traffic increases to 30,000 and with some smart conversion optimization and testing you now convert at 2% and with some smart marketing messages your AOV increases to $100 and your repeat buyers increase to 5%, here's what your Feb sales projections would look like:

30,000 (visitors) x 2% (conversion) x $100 (AOV) = $60,000
600 (first time buyers) x 5% (repeat buyers) x $100 (AOV) = $3000

= February would have a significant lift in projected sales totalling $63,000 for the month.

Feel free to play with these numbers: growth rate, conversion rate, visitor traffic, average order value and repeat buyers (or lifetime value of the customer). You should do one for at least 12 months.

Conclusion:

With the proper planning of your internet marketing plan, you'll find yourself in a much stronger position for online success!