What is an internet marketing plan?
It’s hard to know where you should first focus your efforts to achieve your marketing goals.
After all, there’s so much content on topics of social media marketing, content marketing strategy, search engine strategies, acquiring and building loyal customers — so much information leaving you overwhelmed and ready to take walk to clear your head.
Take a step back, breathe, and I will go through everything you need to know in detail. You’ll be fine. Trust me.
In this post, we’re going to take a look at how you can build an online marketing plan. Furthermore create a marketing strategy for nearly any type of business and how you can use this plan to hit your marketing goals.
Planning for your website business is getting more complex
In previous articles, I talked about many important aspects of internet marketing.
I covered topics like eCommerce ROI forecasting, customer acquisition strategies, and outsourcing your digital marketing. Bookmark them so you can to back them later.
But by the end of this post, you should feel more confident and apply what you learn to your business (small/medium/even big).
Let’s begin with a closer look at your digital marketing strategy.
Setting up your goal
In your internet marketing plan, your goal is different from your strategies and tactics.
A clear understanding between the differences between goals, strategies, and tactics will help you create a successful marketing plan.
Your business goal is the highest level overarching result you are aiming for — what you focus on first.
In my article about creating a social media marketing strategy, I talked about creating goals and objectives using the SMART model.
So a goal or objective for your business might be to generate $10,000 per month in new revenue. And goal could use any form of marketing mix — social media, search, display advertising, and so forth.
Expert tip: At this early stage, I recommend you figure out how much you’re willing to spend in order to achieve your goal. Whether it’s paid or organic traffic, you will need to spend money. Don’t be fooled by SEO agencies that tell you SEO is free. Nothing is.
Knowing how much you are willing to spend will shape the foundation of what marketing tactics you should use.
Okay, so now that we’ve cleared that up, let’s move on to the next section – let’s look at some questions you should ask when setting up your marketing goals.
What questions to ask/answer for your marketing goals
Building the foundation of your internet marketing plan is important.
When creating future media marketing goals, based on content that you have read, ask yourself or your team these basic questions.
#1. How much money do you want to make this year (revenue)
#2. What is the average monthly sales you need (total revenue / 12)
#3. What is your average website conversion rate
#4. Your average value per order (total sales / total transactions)
#5. Base on #5, you can estimate how many transactions you will require
#6. How much web traffic do you need to make this happen?
For example, you want your business to make $240,000 this year.
That is an average of $20k per month.
And if your average value per order is $100, then you need 200 transactions per month.
Your conversion rate will determine how much web traffic you need so you can convert them into paying customers.
The math is straight forward. As soon as you get familiar with the internet marketing terminologies.
This step can go even more in depth, if you are responsible for your website’s P&L, you should check out my eCommerce ROI forecasting template that I’ve used to help 100+ brands.
As you’ll discover, you can change your marketing tactics anytime to help achieve your marketing goal.
That means, if your Google Ads aren’t getting enough web traffic and customers, so you can generate $20,000 per month — change your tactic and test another marketing channel.
Define and understand who you end customer is
As with all businesses and marketing, you must know who your end customer is.
At the most basic level, developing personas allows you to create content and advertising messaging that resonates with your target audience.
For example, instead of showing everyone the same Facebook ad, you can segment by buyer persona and tailor your messaging according to what you know about those different end customers.
Let’s face it. There’s too much noise on the internet. So you need your marketing strategy to break through the crowd, deliver your message to the right people, and become your customers.
Knowing who your customers are will help you customize your marketing tactics — ad text, images, offers, and so on.
I covered how you can create a customer persona here.
How do define your end customer
If you want to develop buyer personas, here are details that you need to fill out. Why? These basic information help you understand your end customer.
There are several different categories of questions you’ll want to ask in order to create a complete persona profile.
The following questions are organized into those categories. Customize this. Remove or add more questions that may be appropriate for your target audience.
20 top basic information for your personas
Role
1) What is your job role?
2) How is your job considered a success?
3) What skills are required to do your job well?
4) What knowledge and tools do you use in your job?
5) What does a typical day look like?
Company
6) In which industry or industries does your company work?
7) What is the size of your company (revenue, employees)?
Goals
8) What do you want to achieve?
9) What does it mean to be successful in your role?
Challenges
10) What are your biggest challenges?
11) What aggravates you and the situation?
Where Do You Get Information
12) How do you learn about new information?
13) What websites or blogs do you read?
14) What social networks do you participate in?
Personal Background / Demographic
15) Provide your personal information (ask their age, whether they’re married, if they have children).
16) What’s your educational background. What level of education did you complete, and what did you study?
17) Describe your career path. How did you end up where you are today?
Shopping Preferences
18) How do you prefer to interact with vendors (e.g. email, phone, in person)?
19) Do you use the internet to research vendors or products? If yes, how do you search for information?
20) Describe a recent purchase. Why did you consider a purchase, what was the evaluation process, and how did you decide to purchase that product or service?
This is one of the formats we use to create personas for small businesses. But there are literally hundreds of persona templates out there. You just need to customize it to fit your business and your preference.
Hubspot has a good template for you to follow, for you to quickly create personas for your audience.
Defining your marketing message
Once you figure out who your end customers are, you can work on your messaging.
I covered how to go about creating your brand message here.
An effective way to create your message is to ask these questions:
#1. Why should someone do business with you; or basically why does your business exist in the first place
#2. How do you plan to solve your end customers’ pain points
#3. What sets you apart from everyone else
You can phrase it however you want, but these questions will help you establish the foundation of your marketing message.
And when you pair this with your personas, you will have an easier time creating content, scheduling social calendars, and promoting offers that will be more valuable to your end customers.
Offers that resonate with customers
Here are some key points you can consider adding into your marketing message to pull your customers into your website.
I’m not asking you to flood your marketing message with all these. But what you should do is make a case for your business. Incorporate these and customize it to your business.
- Same day service or emergency services
- Easy returns
- Satisfaction Guaranteed
- Lowest Price
- Free Consultation
- Trustworthy Staff
- Free shipping
- Free estimates
- Money Back guarantee
Here are a few examples.
Law Firm
“Free consultation on your case. Let’s find out if we can help you win.”
Business Cleaning Services
“We’ll keep your office cleaner than ever, or it’s free.”
Pool Contractors
“We’ll build your pool as if it were our own.”
Picking your marketing channel
Small businesses that are just starting out should stick with one marketing channel to begin with.
This prevents you from spreading your marketing budget to thin.
Remember the audience personas and marketing message you created before this? Great. You should have enough information by now to know which marketing channel to focus on as you get warmed up.
Here’s a summary of what you’re looking to do:
Make people aware of you -> Become an authority and build trust -> Make them an offer -> Turn them into customers
It’s important to build your authority in whatever channel you pick. And you do this by using content strategy, marketing automation, and human touch.
Additionally, you will refine your marketing message and master one channel at a time.
Having said that, in the long-game, you need to diversify your marketing spend — relying on just want channel is a known risk. Why? Advertising platforms like Google and Facebook change their rules frequently. One such change that’s not in your favor could ruin you overnight.
I’ve seen this happen to many businesses in the past, don’t let this happen to your business in the long run.
Consider this your warm up.
It’s necessary to pick multiple marketing channels
As always, marketing is not as black-and-white when it comes to picking the right channel — because there really isn’t. Marketing channels cannot function effectively in silos.
Therefore, you will quickly learn that going with just one marketing channel like Facebook or Google Ads will not achieve peak performance.
Why?
You are sending emails to your customers right? Well, email is another marketing channel. But to continue growing your email list, you need new website traffic that you sign up. And that new traffic will either come from paid or organic traffic.
Even a single channel could contain both organic and paid traffic — so, organic Facebook content posts and Facebook Ads is considered two different marketing channels, per se.
Conclusion
The path to success for any business is a well-thought through plan.
It’s important to know who you are marketing to, and what strategy you need to execute.
Get started now on your plan and using what you’ve learned in this post to grow your small business, using online marketing.
If you are having a difficult time getting started, I recommend spending some time looking at what your competitor is doing. You’ll find valuable information but following their social pages, using tools like spyfu.com, ahrefs, and semrush for some recon intelligence.
Are there any tips you have to share when it comes to creating an online marketing plan? Please let me know in the comments below!
