Developing a winning Internet marketing business plan

by Paul Slack

Following last week’s podcast and Ray’s blog on the marketing revolution, I wanted to get back to the basics and provide some information that can help you move your business from old world marketing to embracing this revolution. A recent study by Marketing Sherpa, identifies issues facing business online today. The three biggest problems are:

• Getting target audience to engage and participate
• Finding the time to do the work necessary
• Converting social followers into paying customers

I’ve spent the last 16 years working with all types of businesses to help them get the most out of the Internet. The fact is that just about any business can be positively impacted. Yet here we are 20 + years after Al Gore invented the internet and still businesses are struggling.  This is due to several factors:

• Lack of knowledge – not understanding how the many pieces work together or where and how their prospective customers what engage with them. Sometimes this is due to brining on the wrong people (employee or consultant). A word of advice, look for experienced business people who understand both business and web marketing. Someone who understands that just because you can doesn’t mean you should.
• Lack of planning – putting tactics before strategy. Web marketing doesn’t work by throwing a lot of tactics on the wall and seeing what sticks. Internet marketing needs to support and align with your overall corporate objectives. When you understand where you are trying to grow as a business and how elements like social media, content marketing, search engine optimization, website usability/messaging help you achieve you company vision and mission, then you are able to apply the right tactics within the best platforms.
• Lack of execution – poorly executing a campaign and not seeing it through. When you throw tactics against the wall then poor execution is sure to follow. The reason is that your team won’t know what to spend their time on or what tactics are helping other tactics, etc. Quickly your web marketing campaign is like playing Jinga and every tactic that fades away has the possibility of causing everything else to come tumbling to the ground.
• Lack of measurement – understanding what winning looks like at the various stages of maturity. Winning looks different 1 month in than it does 12 months in. It’s critical to understand the differences. When you have a good plan and know what to measure at each stage of the game, then you can utilize a management by exception process and focus on the parts of your plan that need attention.

Internet Marketing Business Plan Blog Series

This series will help you overcome these challenges and factors by equipping, enabling, and empowering you and your team to develop and execute a winning Internet Marketing Business Plan.  Through the course of these series I will:

1. Walk you through the steps required to develop a plan that aligns with your corporate objectives and produces results
2. Help you execute a strategy that gets departments working together for a common purpose
3. Show you how to identify topics and content that will inspire and engage your audience
4. Teach you how to establish goals for monitoring and measuring ROI
5. Show you how to identify appropriate tactics that will work based upon your plan and target audience
6. How to vet sites and develop a policy for engagement
7. Picking the best tools for management, monitoring, and listening.

Follow this series each week to learn how to build a plan to will help your business get to the right target audience, work smarter…not harder, and converting followers and traffic into paying customers.  Be sure to comment below with questions so we can keep an active dialog going.

In This Series on Developing a Winning Internet Marketing Business Plan We will review:

Part 1 – An Introduction

Part 2 – What is Internet Marketing