HOW TO CREATE YOUR INTERNET MARKETING PLAN

As an owner of a business you must have a sound internet marketing plan for it. Having an internet marketing plan will firstly improve your brand acknowledgment locally in your geographic area; it will

expose your business to the whole world and you can get international customers for your products and services. If you are having a business plan then you should incorporate the internet marketing plan into that it.

While making a small business internet marketing promotion plan for your business one should consider the following points.

1. Objective of the Internet Marketing Plan:

The first thing that you should decide is objective you want to achieve by using the small business internet marketing promotion plan. These can be; to find new customers, to provide information and support to the consumers, for selling the products and services, for educating your target market about your product or service, to create an online society for your target market etc, create a market for your product. You should also decide the amount of money you estimate to spend every month for internet marketing. If you have a clear and concise objective and budget in your mind regarding your internet marketing plan it will make your marketing more effective.

2. Your Competition:

For making an effective plan you should know and understand your competition. You should know where you stand among competitors; do this by conducting a keyword search. You should do a search with the terms that your customers might use to find your business online, after that you should write down the URL's of your top five competitors. Should research how popular and relevant are their sites in comparison to yours site. Check the traffic ranking of your competitors sites as well as see what other sites link to them.

3. Target Market:

Instead of marketing your business to everyone also

called the shotgun marketing approach, you should find an evidently definable target market that can be easily located and can be associated with your product or service. You can segment your market on the basis of sex, age group, industry, socio-economic group or income class etc. You must find out details about your target market like what do they read, to which groups and associations do they belong, how much they earn, can they afford your product or service etc. So you should first segment your market and after that find out relevant information about the customers.

4. Solution to a Problem:

Customers buy your product because of the reason to solve a particular problem that your product or service solves. You should thus clearly define the problems and issues that your product or service resolves and how does it solve the problem. You should find out that how your solution differs from that of your competitors and what makes you exceptionally competent to provide the solution to their problem. You should present all these information to your customers to show them the usefulness of your product or service.

5. Branding Your Business:

Branding in todays world is very important. Your domain name can either help you to stand out among other brands or can make you nowhere to be found. Thus you should at least buy a personal name and also the name of your business in the .com version, if it is available. If the name is not available you should buy the .com versions of your product names or program names. You should also think of problems that are faced by your customers or solutions that you provide and buy domain names in the .com version of those as well.

6. Assess your website:

Next point to remember is that your web site should be very attractive and appealing. You site should be easily navigable. The content on your web site should concentrate on the problems of your customers and you should show how your product or service can help to solve their problems. You should not only list the features of your product or service but you should also emphasize the benefits that they will gain from purchasing your product or service.

Your primary call to action should be getting the visitor's name and email address by asking them to subscribe to your websites newsletter. You can also provide them free access to a free e-course, a special report, audio, e-book etc.

7. Internet Marketing Strategies:

After creating a web site the problems that occurs in front of most businesses is lack of adequate traffic. You can create traffic to your website in numerous ways, you can use pay-per-click purchases in which you will have to buy a keyword at any search engine and you will pay to the search engine for that keyword and pay for each visitor who is sent to your web site; search engine listing; you can attract traffic through well-written email newsletter that is sent to the customers; you can submit articles on topics related to your target market to ezines, blogs etc. which contains content discussing issues related to your target market; you can submit online press releases with useful information for your target market; you can exchange relevant links with others industries which are having the same target market etc. all these things will attract more and more visitors to your web site and increase your sales.

8. Building a Team:

All these things could not be done alone you will need a team for it. You will have to add professionals to your team who are proficient in their work. By doing this you will get time to manage your business more smoothly. When a business is marketing its products or services on the internet they should include in their team a virtual assistant or online business manager, a web site designer, a graphic designer, a writing expert, a bookkeeper, and intellectual property attorney etc. to run the business efficiently and successfully.

For conducting a victorious Internet marketing campaign, you will have to amalgamate your small business internet marketing promotion plan into the overall marketing plan of the business. Some businesses use internet marketing alone to market their products whereas for most of the businesses internet marketing merely supplements and boosts their offline marketing plan.