7 Internet Marketing Plan Tips To Increase Your ROI

If you are looking to increase your return on investment (ROI) by launching online campaigns that are tailored to your business, then you need to create an internet marketing plan.

Your plan covers all the strategies, tools and campaigns that you need to launch to achieve your goals and boost your ROI.
So here are 7 tips for your internet marketing plan:

1. Have a mission and goals

Your mission is the reason you are in business and it guides all your operations. Whether you are a bricks and clicks business or pure-play internet operation, you need a mission that focuses your efforts and ensures you are on track to create a successful business.

You then need goals that set out what your internet marketing plan needs to achieve in the short and long terms. Your goals and objectives should be specific, relevant, measurable, and achievable and you should ensure that you have the time, money and people resources to make it happen.

2. Segment the market

You will need to identify your customers and know who they are before you can reach them. So you should segment them according to their demographics (age, sex, income, family lifecycle stage), geographics (where they live or are based), Psychographics (lifestyle) and Behavioural (how they use your products). These are basic segmentation variables and they help you to create buyer personas.

To create effective buyer personas, you need to look at the various actions that people can complete on your website such as downloading, purchasing, registering, contacting and then look at the steps that people take to complete them. This is known as customer scenario analysis and it helps you identify their needs and wants.

3. Understand customer behaviour online

Which online channels and devices do your target markets use to research and purchase products and services? Knowing this helps to identify your advertising strategy and send targeted messages when they are online and on devices that will help that to convert easily.

Nowadays, most customers are multi-channel and multi-device users and to keep your brand in front of them when it matters most is very important. They may research on mobile devices but complete their transactions on desktop because of the user device experience.

4. Create a competitive advantage

Your internet marketing plan should identify your competitors and help you to understand what strategies they use. This helps you to create a unique selling proposition (USP) that differentiates your products and services from competitor offers. Building a competitive advantage is especially important online because competitors are only a few clicks away and they can easily copy your advertising messages and offers at low cost.

5. Launch your digital strategy

Your strategy is part of your internet marketing plan and includes all the tactics you need to do to achieve your goals and objectives. It covers the advertising campaigns that you need to launch and how your products will meet customer needs and how they will be able to access them. The digital strategy will be the bulkiest part of your internet marketing plan and will require more work.

6. Choose online promotional tools

Having identified the online channels that you want to promote your business on such as pay per click (PPC) advertising, social media, affiliate marketing, email marketing, online PR and so on, you now need to identify the tools available in each of these channels. With social media for example, you have tools or platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Hootsuite, Buffer and many others that you can use. So you should pick the most relevant to your business and target markets and use them effectively to boost your ROI.

7. Create KPIs and Reports

Finally, you need to keep track of progress with key performance indicators (KPIs) that help you to benchmark and see how you are performing against competitors. Using reports in Google Analytics, you can identify the metrics that are important to your business like bounce rates, goal conversions and others and use these to create your objectives and KPIs.

Summary

Download my free internet marketing plan template to start planning your campaigns and strategy and contact me if you need help planning and launching your strategy.