Marketing Plans

A marketing plan for your website is essential as it helps you make the best day-to-day and long term decisions which in turn will help you realize more leads and sales for whatever product or service you are selling.The creation of a marketing plan need not be difficult or a drain on your time. It doesn’t require you to hold a marketing degree or have a lot of experience however you will need to put some effort into your plan or engage consultants like Black Sun to work with you.

We believe there are five steps to the creation of a good marketing plan for your website including:

• Gathering and analyzing your information 
• Outlining your key challenges 
• Developing your website objectives 
• Creation of strategies 
• Implementation of your marketing programs

Stage 1: Gathering and analyzing your information

To begin with you will need to put together all the key information about your company, your competitors, your customers, your prospects and other companies in your industry. You shold aim to gather some market research about how other companies in your field are utilising the web especially relating to how they are selling their products, how they are promoting, what kind of pricing structures they have in place and what their distribution channels are. With this information you can then undertake a comprehensive industry analyses which will help you identify your ideal target customers.

Stage 2: Outlining your key challenges

The second stage helps you identify what the key hurdles or challenges your business faces online. Its a good idea to do the research and then write these challenges down. This will help you stay focused as you complete your marketing plan. For example. "How many other providers offering similar services to ours are out there and what makes our services unique?", "Can we compete with their pricing?", "How can we deliver product or service to customers in other countries?" etc

Stage 3: Developing your website objectives

When you develop your key website objectives you are really now looking at the big picture and addressing questions such as "How will we overcome our biggest marketing challenges?" ie "How are we going to market our service into these European countries when we only have an office in Detroit?" So for example if your company’s biggest site-related challenge is to work out how to use your site to increase your customer base in Europe, you would outline this objective on your marketing plan as a section called "To increase new customer base in Europe cost effectively by making better use of online marketing techniques such as affiliate marketing and Pay per Click Advertising with Google."

Stage 4: Creation of strategies

Your web strategies directly support your website objectives and help define the overall approach you will need to undertake if you are to meet your online objectives. For example if you are wanting to increase your customer base as outlined in Stage 3 you will need to implement the following strategies: a) improve your online marketing channels, branding and communications, b) increase the awareness about your company on the web as well as c) ensure you promote your website, the benefits of your services and it's advantages to your existing clients.

Stage 5: Implementation of your marketing programs

This is where you get down to implementation including carrying out the various things you have outlined in your marketing plan. This will include deploying your marketing programs to support your strategies such as improving your online marketing channels, shaping your brand, increasing awareness of your company online, refining your communication and clarifying the information you offer to prospective and existing clients.. There are many ways you can do this including the use of: email newsletters, Pay per Click advertising, affiliate programs, press releases, discussion boards, submitting your site to search engines and directories, translating your website, creating targeted blogs, building focused niche or minisites, partcipating in forums and more which we'll cover in the Internet Marketing section of our site.