Which Online Marketing Plan Format For Your Business?

Whatever your business or industry sector, you need an online marketing plan to promote your products or services, inform and educate potential customers, position your business and connect with your website visitors.
An online marketing plan format is the structure that your plan takes and this should be customised to your needs and should help you achieve your business goals and mission.
Here is a format that you can use:

Marketing Audit

Every online marketing plan format should begin with an audit of the internal and external environment. The internal environment includes all your products and processes and the stakeholders that are important to your business including your customers, suppliers, investors, bank, competitors, the public and so on.
The external environment includes all the macro forces that are outside your control but affect your business like technology, social factors, economic forces and political forces. These should be explained from an online perspective and how they will affect you in implementing your online strategy.
From this you can then create a SWOT Analysis to list the Strengths and Weaknesses of your business in the online sphere and the Opportunities and Threats that you can capitalise on and minimise respectively.

Marketing Objectives

From your audit and analysis you will have a wealth of information about your products, services, potential customers, digital tools and channels, competitors and the forces that could affect your online marketing strategy.
You now need to focus on creating specific, measurable and relevant marketing objectives that will lead to online success. Your objectives should focus on such things as traffic volumes, percentage of returning visitors, website stickiness, impact on social media and many others that you can choose from.

Digital Strategy

The digital strategy is an important part of your online marketing plan format and it explains how you will target the market segments you’ve identified with your product and service offers. It also describes how you will position your products or services in the mind of your target customers.

Target Markets

Target market is still part of your digital strategy and at the early stage of your planning, you would have identified customer segments that could benefit from your products and then created specific offers for each segment.
You can opt for a multi-segment strategy were you target multiple segments with different products or services or a niche strategy were you target one segment with one offer. Your choice will depend on your time, financial and people resources.

Promotional Mix

Also part of your strategy, this is where you decide which online promotional tools and channels you will focus on. Some notable ones include social media, search engine optimisation, pay per click advertising, Google Adwords, email marketing and more.
Budgets and Control
Finally, you should create a budget to implement your digital strategy and also control your plan to ensure you are on track to achieving your objectives.

Summary

Need help with creating an online marketing plan for your business? Get in touch to find out more about my services and how I can help you create the best online marketing plan format for your business and launch your advertising and promotional campaigns on Google, Bing, Yahoo, Social Media and others.