Internet Marketing Plans

If you own a business that has a website, at some point you have probably thought “How will people know about my website?” Just because you have a website online, does not mean that people will go to it, or even be able to find it. It is important in the formative stages of your site to begin developing an internet marketing plan for your site, because a lot of the implementation of your internet marketing plan can usually be integrated during the initial programming of your site. If you haven’t put an internet marketing plan together, don’t worry, its never too late! Here are some tips we have for formulating a good internet marketing plan:

1. Identify The Current Marketplace

Sit back for a second and examine the landscape. Search keywords that you would for your business and see who shows up. What do they do well and poorly? After you can identify your competition, you can begin to decide how you will differentiate yourself from them. Undoubtedly you have a superior product or service than they do.

2. Identify Your Target Market

This is almost a continuation of number 1. Once you begin to see how your place in the market is, you can identify who your target demographic for your product or service is. This will be crucial in deciding the way to move forward in designing your internet marketing plan.  Is your brand hip and trendy geared to 18-35? Does your company provide a service geared towards professionals  35-60? Answering questions about your brand identity will help you identify who your target demographic is. Once you have done this, research where they go, what their habits are online etc. this will give you a better idea as to what areas of the web you will need to focus on and avoid.

3. Determine What Advertising Means Work For You

For some sites, mass emailing work,  for some sites having their products listed on Google shopping works. You need to determine what advertising means best works for your product or service.  Once you find one that works, there are likely to be similar avenues to use to advertise.

4. Implement Your Plan

This is the best part, its now time to put your plan to action and put up the banner ads, or open an Ad Words campaign, or cross sell on eBay, or list your products in Google shopping, whatever it takes for you to succeed in your internet marketing plan, do that now.

5. Monitor Your Results

This part is crucial, once you have your plan in place and moving, you need to check the results and see what is happening and what is working. The best way to do this is through a tracking or analytics software installed for your site. These can be really detailed down to how a user found your site, down to the keywords they used in which search engine. This information can be as good as gold when you move on to step 6.

6. Refine The Process

After you have a good idea of what works and doesn’t work, you will need to back through and get rid of whats not working at a high enough conversion rate and focus more time and energy on what is really converting.