In urgent need of an effective online marketing plan but not sure where to start? This detailed guide outlines the essential elements of an effective plan.
1000s of businesses such as yours have discovered how to stop guessing when it comes to marketing online by getting SME.Consulting’s custom 90-day online marketing plan HERE. If you’re still evaluating your options though, this guide outlines essential elements that should be included in an effective online marketing plan.
First thing’s first. Regardless of how it is structured, the plan should be straightforward and easy to understand! It should provide a clear overall direction for all your online marketing efforts.
Preparing to Write
If you have made your mind up to create your plan yourself instead of hiring someone to, then before you begin, at the very least, you will need to pull together the following information:
- Your existing client demographic (estimated demand, purchase motivation etc.)
- Your market size, target markets and your market penetration to date.
- Your marketing objectives (reasons for creating a plan – increase brand awareness, sales etc.)
- Your latest financial reports.
- A list of your local and global competitors and a list of distribution channels.
Market Situation
To begin, create a Market situation section, which should contain thorough research and an analysis of your competitors, target market and your business challenges. Make sure to provide a clear description of the state of the marketplace. This can be done through primary research by analyzing or surveying your existing clients or through secondary research by gathering exhaustive statistics and information, publicly available, about your market. *We know, these tasks can be daunting, that’s why we make it easier for you*.
Below is an example of what an introduction to your marketing situation section can read as:
Vekin and Associates is an accounting firm founded in 1991. We provide reliable tax services to individuals, startup businesses and existing businesses with under $500,000 in annual sales. We also provide bookkeeping and payroll support services via our online platform (website). Our market area is Miami, New York and Colorado. For startup businesses, our clients range between $75,000 and $200,000. We get most of our orders from restaurants, stores, gas stations and courier services. Our competition is a group of 8 firms. Based on online exposure and estimated market penetration, we believe we rank third in the group of our competitors. We have our strongest position in the restaurant sector.
Writing the marketing situation section will help you pull all relevant information about your business and market together and can help justify your current approach, the need for a new marketing strategy or the need to rebrand or diversify.
Threats and Opportunities
The Threats and opportunities section is an extension of the market situation and focuses on the implications of the market.
- What online marketing trends, tools and platforms favor your business and which ones are against your business?
- Is there any competitive trend that works to the benefit of your business?
- Is the demographic of your existing clients in favor or against?
- What online activities have yielded results in the last 90 days?
There are many places you can go to get information on the trends of your market. For instance, you can talk to business reporters or professional associations that you belong to. The following is an example of how the mix of online and offline threats and opportunities of Vekin and Associates firm can look like.
Threats
The firm faces various identifiable threats in the upcoming year such as:
- Our website UI (front and back end interface ‘user experience’) needs to be upgraded. Since the cost to upgrade is very high, we will need to work with the existing version for a period of 9 months although the experience will be a disadvantage to some of our clients.
- Two of our clients are facing difficult prospects. We will need to replace this business this year.
- Our major competitor has capitalized on a new lucrative online marketing platform.
Opportunities - Changes in the tax and advertising laws have made it easier to promote our brand on a much larger scale in our geographic target market.
- We have been requested to participate in various educational venues in the upcoming year. This will provide our business with great exposure as well present online video marketing opportunities through recording or live streaming.
- The economy continues to be stronger and we believe that our clients will continue to flourish in the growth cycle.
Marketing objectives
In the marketing objectives section, you are challenged to draw a clear picture of the future of your business. What are the specific marketing objectives you want to achieve? Your marketing objectives should be based on a narrative description of what you are planning to accomplish backed by numbers that will provide you with a concrete guidance. For instance, you can say that you want to increase growth by 5% in 90 days solely from implementing specific new online marketing techniques on a set budget, which is easy to understand and verifiable.
Goal For It
How do you go about setting a quantifiable goal? Well, the best starting point is a review of your past sales, your business growth and the size (worth) of the typical customer that came exclusively through online marketing. You then compare that to the level of your current ONLINE marketing efforts. Did you attempt exhaustive strategies and throw enough resources to get those clients? If you didn’t try as much as you now know you could have but you got even a handful of clients through online marketing, then you should be excited of what can come!
- SME.Consulting, through our 90-Day Online Marketing Plan and Content Mapping, can take what you have done successfully so far and show you how to amplify it to the next level! *
Always make a reasonable projection of what you will be able to accomplish towards your new marketing objectives by considering everything we mentioned above.
Marketing Strategies
The fourth section of your online marketing plan should dive right into the strategies. We will let you get creative in figuring out which methods will be effective for your specific brand and product. We will however, tell you that it it’s important to implement new online marketing strategies by treating them as a piece of ‘software’ and then letting them go on auto-pilot while you monitor the results. Obviously, you would still need to manually continue executing them but, with an effective system in place, results will start to become predictable and repeatable. The strategies that provide the highest ROI are the ones that you should scale and invest more into.
Have a fresh focus of getting one new online marketing strategy or growth hack off the ground every few weeks. That’s why a 90-day online marketing plan is the best type of plan to create. It is filled up with many ‘growth hacking’ strategies that can be implemented in timed, bite-sized chunks that your whole team can easily follow. Long term online marketing goals are harder to achieve and can bring confusion and stress among staff members.
Budget and Control
Whether done right or poorly, online marketing activities always cost money or time and sometimes both. There are great tools for automating some online marketing processes (think Google Ads/SEO and a Squeeze Page).
Tracking Effectiveness
Besides the ‘vanity’ metrics that you will monitor such as “likes” and “followers’, some of the more significant indicators of success are increases in:
- Overall site traffic in unique visitors
- Number of traffic sources
- Mobile traffic
- Click Through Rate (CTR)
- Conversion Rate
- Cost Per Lead
- Bounce Rate
- Average Page Views
- Average Time on pages
- Rate of Return Visitors
and ultimately,
- Cost to Acquire a Customer (marketing and advertising costs divided by new paying customers)
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Read the next article in SME.Consulting’s small business education series:
The Hard Truth for Businesses without a Digital Marketing Strategy by Chrispen Pasipanodya –https://sme.consulting/blog/the-hard-truth-for-businesses-without-a-digital-marketing-strategy/
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Written by Chrispen Pasipanodya
Senior Consultant at SME.Consulting
