Quick Steps to Create an Online Marketing Plan of your Own

If you own a small servicing business and if you have a good online marketing plan in hand, then this will improve the recognition of your company locally in your geography and also give your business exposure to a large set of customers across the world through the internet. Once you have your business vision in place and have committed it to paper, you need to convert that marketing piece into a plan. But if you are like most business clients, then you will confine your marketing strategies and your business only to your head and will not write it down.

Image Credit : Etelligentstrategies

As you set out on making a plan for internet marketing, there are a few things that you must consider:

1. Objective:

The objective of your marketing plan is that which you want it to accomplish. An objective could be to find more new clients, to provide good information and service to present clients, to sell products and services, educate your customers as well as your staff about your products or services, creating online communities for your target customers, maintaining a monthly budget for your plan or keeping a budget and goal that will make your marketing plan effective.

2. Marketing funnel:

A successful online business company owner must have something called a marketing funnel, through which the gain or funnel clients. It starts with the top, which is wide and represents low- cost services and products and give- aways. Then you move them through the funnel cone to the narrower parts, which are increases in the investments of the clients for your services and products that are higher priced. The services and products offered by you must contain various price points in order to create a funnel effect. The plans that you have must repair any flaws that you have in your marketing strategy to eventually create a marketing funnel for your clients.

3. Competitors:

You must know how and where you are placed among your group of competitors. This will only help you make your business stringer and better. You must perform a search for the keywords that viewers will access your business through the internet. To compare, you must find your top five competitors and find out the relevance and popularity of their sites. You could use Alexa to find out their traffic ranking and also see the number of links to their sites. You must see what are the unique things offered by them and find the gaps in your own services and products offered.

4. Target market:

Do not try to target everyone. Find and define a target market clearly that you can locate and describe well. Target a particular sex or a given age group or a specific industry or a particular socio-economic group. Find out what interests them online  and offline, what kind of material they read, the associations and groups they come from personally s well as professionally, their income. You must keep in mind whether your services and products can be afforded by them or not. Look up to find the keywords they commonly use with software like the Google Keyword tool.

5. Solving a problem:

People will look into your service and product to be able to solve their problem. You must see the problems that affect your target markets and how you can play a role in solving them. Make your solutions unique and more qualified than your other competitors in your niche.

6. Branding:

The domain name you select can make you popular or make you a set of brandless solutions. You must buy a professional name, a personal name and a business name in the name of your website. Then buy .com domain names for your services and products. Using a fully featured domain registrar, you can convert the domain names bought to inside pages of your site or make them into stand- alone sale pages.

It is also advisable to consider the problems your target market faces and the solutions provided by you and come up with .com domain names for these too. Many such websites already exist, for example, StopYourDivorce.com. These will obviously attract a good target market and say a lot about the website just in the name.

7. Assess:

The look of your website must appeal to your customers. You can achieve this with a single font for your text, a simple well-planned color scheme, a layout that is easily navigable, and easily accessible buttons for links to the various pages on your site. The content of your site must concentrate on the problems faced by your target market and how your products or services are the perfect solutions to these problems. Instead of listing your product features, list the benefits of your product. People prefer benefits to features. Hire a website designer to only design your site and not to write content for you. Nobody knows your business and content better than you yourself do.

Have clear calls to action on each and every web page of your site. Calling to action is through tasks like getting the name and email ids of your visitors by doing things like asking them to subscribe to your ezine account by offering a free ecourse, ebook or report. Have a good collection of information to show your expertise. Create a website that satisfies your customers and not the search engines or yourself.

8. Technology for business management:

Check if you have access to technology and services in order to help sell your service or product on the internet. You will only require a merchant account, and a virtual gateway for your transaction, a full- fledged shopping cart for selling electronic and physical products. You will also have to set up some auto- responder services in order to keep track of your visitors and potential customers. It is also advisable to look into email news services, appointment setting service, auto- responder programs, blogging software, sites for article submission, services for distribution of press releases, services for management of site content, and software or services for management of link exchanges. These will be beneficial and will help you manage your website in the long run.

9. Marketing strategies:

You must increase the traffic to your website to increase your profits. You can do so by including pay- per- click services, where you buy keywords from search engines and pay for placement of that keyword in the search engine rankings and pay every time a visitor searches for that keyword and is redirected to your site; search engine ranks, in which your website is in the top search results for a keyword through the use of keywords appropriately in your page title, page description tags, and page content optimization; writing and publishing fresh content regularly; submitting articles related to your niche regularly to popular article directories; posting content that is fresh, creative and informative and handles issues faced by your target market well on a blog; posting interviews of accomplished people in your niche; a series of teleconferences that have taken place with regard to your market niche; regular press releases with relevant information and updated news to attract customers from your target market; affiliate marketing with other websites in your niche to maximize profits.

10. Team building:

To be able to create a website on your own is almost impossible. You will have to build a good team with an excellent combination of professionals who will cooperate to make your site popular and unique. It is no good to even try doing it without a team.

About Author : Harry Sehgal writes for Blog and you can read his new article on c++ developers. You can share his articles.