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Internet Marketing Plan Template

How to Write an Internet Marketing Plan

by Peter Geisheker

If you need help writing an Internet marketing plan and/or marketing your website, please call
The Geisheker Group Marketing Company at (920) 592-9595 or email us.

Behind every successful Internet business is a well-researched Internet marketing plan. An Internet marketing plan guides a company step-by-step how to market its product or service to a specific target market and it helps a company remain focused on its marketing objectives.

Your Internet Marketing Plan will define all of the components of your marketing strategy. You will address the details of your market analysis, sales, advertising, and public relations campaigns. The most successful Internet marketing plans integrate both Internet marketing strategies as well as traditional (offline) marketing strategies.

The Topics You Need to Discuss in Your Internet Marketing Plan include:

1. Market Research
Collect, organize, and write down data about the market that is currently buying the product(s) or service(s) you will sell. (From now on we'll refer to your products or services as "product".)

Some areas to consider:

Market dynamics, patterns including seasonality
Customers-demographics, market segment, target markets, needs, buying decisions
Product—what’s out there now and what's the competition offering? Conduct market research by going to google.com and conduct searches on the types of products or services you want to sell
Current sales in the industry
Suppliers-vendors that you will need to rely on
Target Market(s)—To be successful, focus on one or two small niche markets instead of a large general market. Niche markets have far less competition and they tend to be more profitable. If there is one thing you can do to help your odds of being successful in business it is to focus on one or two small niche markets

2. Product
Describe your product (or service). How does your product relate to the market? What does your market need, what do they currently use, what do they need above and beyond current use?

3. Competition
Describe your competition. Develop your "unique selling proposition." What makes you stand apart from your competition? Why are you special? Why should a customer choose to do business with you instead of one of your competitors? The better job you can do to differentiate yourself from your competitors, the more success you will have.

4. Mission Statement
Write a few sentences that state:

"Key market" - who you're selling to – be very specific!
"Contribution" - what you're selling
"Distinction" - your unique selling proposition – why are you different from your competition?

5. Internet Marketing Strategies
Write down the Internet marketing and promotion strategies that you want to use or at least consider using. Strategies to consider include:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO). What this means is using optimization techniques so search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN) will rank your website within the top 10 search results. By doing this you can get literally thousands of people to your website every day for free. To do this I recommend you use a fantastic software tool called SEO Elite.
Pay Per Click Search Engine Marketing. When you use this service you are bidding on keywords so that your website text ad is displayed when a person conducts a search on a particular keyword or key phrase. Google, Yahoo and MSN all have pay per click internet marketing services.
Affiliate Marketing. This is where other websites market your products for you and you pay them a commission on each sale. This is an outstanding way to create a successful Internet business.
Link Exchanges. This is where you and other websites exchanges links to drive traffic to each other’s website. Exchanging links with other websites is also a great way to get better rankings in the search engines. The reason for this is that search engines want to give top rankings to the the websites that are most popular in their category/industry. The best way for the search engines to determine which websites are the most popular is to see who has the most links pointing at their website. That is why getting a lot of links pointing at your website is so important Two great services for helping you find link
exchange partners are LinkMetro and LinkMarket. I use them both and they are great.
Write Articles and distribute them online. This is a great way to get tons of one-way links pointed at your website (which search engines love!). I try to write one new article each weak and it has gotten me thousands of links pointed at my websites. And remember, the more links that point at your website, the higher search engines will rank your website. And, if getting tons of links pointing at your website wasn't enough, writing articles will also send targeted traffic to your website and it will make you an expert in your field. The way it works is very simple. You write a 1-page article and use online article distribution services to distribute your article to hundreds other websites, blogs, and ezines (electronic magazines). People them read your articles to learn about your products or services. The best two services to use for distributing your article are EzineArticles and Isnare.
Write press releases and distribute them online. Just like writing and submitting articles, this is a very simple and extremely effective way to get tons of links pointed at your website. It is also a great way drive targeted traffic to your website. For more information, please visit PRWeb.
Advertise in ezines (also know as an internet newsletter or an internet magazine). This is another simple yet highly effective way to market your products or services online.

6. Offline/Traditional Advertising Strategies

Networking-Go where your market is, Chamber of Commerce, BNI, etc.
Direct marketing using sales letters, brochures, postcards, flyers, etc.
Advertising-Print media, directories, billboards, yellow pages, radio, TV
Training programs-Seminars that you give to increase awareness
Write articles for magazines, your local newspaper, and other publications read by your industry. Doing this will help you to become known as an expert
Direct/personal selling
Publicity/press releases
Trade shows
Referral programs
Co-marketing with businesses that share your target market
Barter

7. Pricing, Positioning and Branding
From the information collected, establish strategies for determining the price of your product, where your product will be positioned in the market and how you will achieve brand awareness.

8. Budget
Budget your dollars. What strategies can you afford? How much can you afford to spend per month?

9. Marketing Goals
Establish quantifiable marketing goals. This means goals that you can turn into numbers. For instance, your goal might be to gain at least 10 new clients each month or to generate 100 leads per month.

10. Monitor Your Results
Test and analyze. Identify the strategies that are working.

Survey customers
Track sales, leads, visitors to your web site, percent of sales to impressions
Determine which marketing strategies are producing the most customers and which are producing the least customers
Measure Return on Investment per each marketing activity

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