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Jonas Bernardino
Marketing Forex |
Objective of Internet Marketing Plan: What do you want to accomplish by
using Internet marketing? To find new clients? Provide services and info to
existing clients? Sell services or products? Educate your target market or your
staff about your product or service? Create an online community for your target
market? How much money to have to spend each month on this Internet marketing
plan? Having a goal and budget in mind will make your marketing more effective.
Marketing Funnel: The most successful online business owners
have a marketing funnel (think of it as an upside down triangle) through which
they "funnel" clients. The process begins from the wide top of the
funnel, representing low-cost products or free give-aways, and moving clients
down through the funnel to the narrower portions which represent gradually
increasing investments from the clients from your higher-priced products and
services. What products and services do you currently offer? Are they at varied
price points that would create a funnel effect? What plans do you have to
increase your product or service line? Will those new offerings plug gaps in
your marketing funnel?
Your Competition: Knowing and understanding where you stand
among your competitors can you help you strengthen your marketing message. Do a
keyword search for the terms someone might use to find your business online.
Write down the URL's of your top 5 competitors. How popular and relevant are
their sites? You can check their traffic ranking with Alexa,
http://www.alexa.com/#traffic, as well as see what other sites link to them.
Does your competition offer something unique? Where are the gaps in the service
or product offerings?
Target Market: Instead of trying to marketing to everyone
(the shotgun marketing approach), find a clearly definable target market that
you can easily describe and locate. Are they male or female? What age group?
What industry? What socio-economic group? Where do they hang out on- and
off-line? What do they read? To what groups and associations (real and virtual,
personal and professional) do they belong? How much money do they make? Can
they easily afford your product or service? What keywords are they using to
search for businesses like yours online? You can use Google Keywords.
Solution to a Problem: The reason that someone will buy
your product or hire to you to provide a service is to solve a particular
problem that they have. What problems and issues plague your target market? How
does your product or service solve that problem? How does your solution differ
from that of your competitors? What makes you uniquely qualified to provide the
solution to their problem?
Branding Your Business: Your domain name can either help
you be memorable or cast you into a sea of "brandless" solutions. At
a minimum, you'll want to buy both your personal name as well as the name of
your business in the .com version, if it's available. Then buy the .com
versions of your product names and program names. If you use a full-featured
domain registrar, you'll be able to point and mask these domains to internal
pages of your web site, or use them as stand-alone sales letter pages.
You may
also think of problems faced by your target market or solutions that you
provide and buy domain names in the .com version of those as well. Internet
marketer Dean Jackson brands his ebook on how to stop a divorce by owning the
domain name, StopYourDivorce.com, This is a compelling solution to his target
market -- men who have been ignoring their wives' complaints of marital
dissatisfaction and come home one day to an empty house and a note telling him
that she's filing for divorce.
Assess Your Website: Your web site should be visually
appealing, with one primary font for the text and a simple primary color
scheme, along with an easy-to-navigate layout, and readily identifiable buttons
to link to other pages in the site. Your content should focus on and address
the problems of your visitors and how your product or service can help solve
their problems. Rather than listing the features of your product or service,
detail the benefits they'll gain from purchasing your product or service.
People rarely buy features -- they buy benefits. Don't depend on your web site
designer to write your content -- that is best done by you, as you know your
business and your target market better than anyone.
Present a
clear call to action that is clearly shown on every page of your site. In an
online business, your primary call to action should be getting the visitor's name
and primary email address by asking him subscribe to your ezine or by giving
him access to a free ecourse, special report, audio recording, or ebook.
Lastly, provide an abundace of readily available information to demonstrate
your expertise (articles, blog posts, free downloads, giveaways, contests).
Your visitor is always asking WIIFM (What's In It For Me) -- make your web site
about your visitor, not about you.
Online Business Management Technology: Do you have access to the
appropriate services and technology that will help you sell your product or
service online? At a minimum you'll need a merchant account (permits you to
take credit card payments) that includes a virtual gateway (enables you to
process transactions online) and a full-featured shopping cart that will permit
you to sell both physical and electronic products and create a series of
autoresponders to follow up with buyers and non-buyers alike. Depending on your
marketing plan, you may also want to investigate email newsletter distribution
services, online appointment setting services, stand-alone autoresponders,
blogging software, article submission sites, online press release distribution
services, website content management services, and links exchange management
services and software.
Internet Marketing Strategies: How will you create traffic to your
website? There are countless ways to do this, including: pay-per-click
purchases (in which you buy a keyword at a search engine and pay for placement
on that search engine for that keyword and pay for each visitor who clicks on
that link and is sent to your site); organic search engine listing ranking (in
which your site comes up at the top of the non-sponsored listings on a search
engine by having keyword rich descriptions in the page title and page
desciption meta tags and then optimizing each page for no more than 3 keywords
in the first 250 words on a page); well-written email newsletter that is
published on a regular basis; submission of articles on topics related to your
target market to article submission directories; regularly post entries to a
blog aimed at your target market, full of content discussing issues related to
that target market; series of podcasts containing interview with experts of
interest to your target market; ongoing series of teleconferences containing
value-added content for your target market; submission of online press releases
with new tips information for your target market; exchange relevant links with
others in different industries with the same target market;
Building a Team: You'll never be able to do this all alone. The
most successful business owners don't even try. You need to add experts to your
team who are great at what they do so that you've got the time and energy to go
out and do what you do best -- selling your products and services to your
target market. Some great experts to add to your team include a virtual
assistant or online business manager, an online business coach, a web site
designer, a graphic designer, a writing expert (editor, ghost writer, proof
reader or copy writer), a bookkeeper, and intellectual property attorney, to
name a few.
To conduct
a successful Internet marketing campaign, you need to integrate your plan into
the overall marketing plan/business vision that you have for your service
business. Some businesses will thrive off Internet marketing alone; however,
for most, Internet marketing simply complements and enhances your offline
marketing strategies.
