Steps to Creating Your Internet Marketing Plan

As a small business owner, you probably know that having a sound internet marketing plan is a key factor in increasing your brand’s clout.

The benefits of making your brand more recognizable are numerous, such as exposing you to millions of new potential customers around the world, as well as in your local business locality.

Usually, it is easier to integrate an internet marketing plan into an already existing written business plan or vision. Unfortunately, many business owners carry their business plans in their heads without committing anything on paper.

Here are the steps you need to consider as you come up with an internet marketing plan:

• Decide on the objective of the internet marketing plan

What specific objective do you want to accomplish with your internet marketing plan? Do you want to garner new customers? Or do you intend to provide more information to your existing clients? Is it selling a service or product?

And then, how much money is set aside for the internet marketing plan every month? Your plan will be more effective if you have an objective and budget in place.

• Marketing funnel

It is almost impossible for an online business to succeed without a marketing funnel, and it’s no wonder that the most successful online businesses have one. If we think of this as an inverted triangle, the process starts at the wide top of the funnel, corresponding to low-cost items or free give-aways, and then taking clients down through narrower parts of the funnel depicting steadily increasing investments form high-paying clients buying higher priced services and products.

Are the current products you offer varied in prices, and can that bring about the funnel effect?

•  Know your competition

You will be best suited to strengthen your marketing message if you know where you stand among your competition. Carry out a keyword search that most likely represents the search phrases that someone looking for your business may use.

Then find out how popular and relevant your top 5 competitors are. Use a traffic ranking tool to establish their rank. I would recommend you SEO Power Suite to do this on autopilot. You can also look for gaps in their offerings.

• Identify your target market

Rather than using the ‘shot gun’ approach to marketing, identify a particular target market that will be easy for you to locate. You can then analyze your target market’s attributes and build your marketing strategy around those attributes.

• Offer solutions to problems

People buy particular products or services in the hope that they will be able to solve a specific problem. This becomes easier for you if you identify a target market and study their attributes, and then come up with solutions that make you unique from competitors.

• Focus on your business’ brand

If your business name is available in the .com version, buy it. Alternatively, you can buy a domain in your personal name if available. You should do the same for your product names and programs. If your domain registrar is full-featured, you can mask those names to your site’s internal pages and use them as stand-alone sales pages.

• Make an assessment of your website

Make your website very appealing and easy to navigate. Use consistent fonts and a uniform layout and make your content focused on the solutions you are offering. Each page should have a clear call to action, which is most likely getting your website visitor’s contact information for email marketing campaigns.

These are some of the basic things you need to do to build a sound internet marketing plan. Of course there are more things you may need to integrate into your internet marketing plan, depending on type and size of your business.

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