The 7 steps of the E-Marketing Planning Process are a method for developing a successful strategy for internet marketing. The steps are: identification of the project requirements, needs; documentation; definition of an e-marketing strategy, analysis, implementation, and evaluation.
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A well-prepared e-marketing plan can be the key to success for every new web project. After all, it’s the first and very important step on the road to a successful business. If you start your e-business without a well-built e-marketing plan, you’ll have fewer chances to succeed.
E- Marketing Plan
The E-Marketing plan is a blueprint for E-Marketing strategy formulation and implementation.
It is a guiding, dynamic document that links the firm’s e-business strategy with technology-driven marketing strategies and lays out details for plan implementation through marketing management.
The plan serves as a road map to guide the firm, allocate resources, and make decisions.
2.3. Two Types of Common Plans
The Napkin Plan:
Entrepreneurs may jot down ideas on a napkin.
Large companies might create a just-do-it, activity-based, bottom-up plan.
The Venture Capital E-Marketing Plan:
It is a more comprehensive plan for entrepreneurs seeking startup capital.
Sources of funding
- Bank loans
- Private funds
- Angel investors
- Venture capitalists (VCs)
1. Situation Analysis
The first step in the process of creating an effective e-marketing plan is to conduct a situation analysis. This involves identifying and analyzing all the relevant factors that influence your business, its customers, and the competition.
The situation analysis will help you to determine who your target market is and what they want or need from your product or service. It will also help you identify any weaknesses or strengths of your existing marketing efforts, as well as any opportunities for improvement that may exist.
You should use this information to create a comprehensive list of all aspects of your business including:
- Products/Services (including competitor products/services)
- Marketing Strategies/Plans (including competitor strategies/plans)
- Sales/Marketing Channels (including competitor sales/marketing channels)
2. Plan for Strategic E-Marketing
It is more important than ever to invest in a robust e-marketing strategy. The companies that succeed are those that anticipate the different types of information that their prospective customers desire and then make it available to them; they will position themselves as industry leaders by being active and influential outside of their website and being available to their target online audience;
You are already playing catch-up if your competitors have already implemented an E-Marketing strategy. If not, then there is a strategic opportunity. Are you going to take advantage of it?
E-marketing campaigns must be properly planned to ensure that all marketing objectives, messaging, and comprehensive execution plans are clearly defined to ensure optimal performance.
BeeSeen’s goal is to help clients increase sales and achieve their goals and objectives through strategic E-Marketing plans. Research, discovery, and planning are crucial to determining the right E-Marketing services and roadmap. A successful marketing campaign begins with proper planning that focuses on developing an effective E-Marketing strategy.
E-Marketing: 6 Key Benefits
- Increasing visibility and brand awareness
- Expanding the target audience
- Acquisition of customers
- Cost-effective marketing
- Results that can be tracked and measured
- Retention of customers
3. Define Your Target Audience
Who is your target audience? Understand who you are talking to, what is important to them, what their wants and needs are, and how your brand can fill them. Consider demographics, psychographics, lifestyle, brand perception, and beliefs of your audience.
Understand the perceptions in the marketplace about your brand. By tapping your current customers, you can gain valuable insight to help identify growth markets, pinpoint new product offerings and make marketing decisions easier. Year-end is a great time to conduct an online survey of your customers to collect new information.
Some companies gear campaigns towards their current target markets, either to increase market share or overtake a competitor as the market leader. Others try to get into a whole new market.
You may have one or both goals in mind, as long as you have a clear understanding of the people or businesses you want to attract.
The best way to evaluate new markets is with demographic or firmographic information. Demographics refers to consumer ages, genders, locations, and other information. Firmographics relate to companies, their employees, their products, and more.
If you sell consumer-based products, you want to use demographics to research current and new markets. If you run a B2B company, you want to use firmographics.
And once you find your new markets, you can move on to the next step.
4.Objectives.
Further, businesses that rely solely on numbers often miss important values within their organizations. It’s easy to become driven by numbers; it’s harder to create softer goals. The 5s model was developed by Dave Chaffey and PR Smith in Emarketing Excellence (2012) as a tool for reviewing websites. The method has been used by me for many years to develop business objectives. Having owners and managers consider the business as a whole rather than just sales alone tends to challenge their thinking within a business.
Take a look at your business. Have you set SMART objectives for:
- Is there a sales forecast; sales figures, number of new clients expected?
- How can you improve customer service?
- Providing information to clients through communication (speak)?
- Would you like to save time, increase business efficiency, and reduce costs?
- It’s a wow factor! Are you looking for ways to make your business stand out?
The objective of an e-marketing plan is to increase your sales and profits.
- To determine the target market for your product or service.
- To determine what the competition is doing in terms of marketing their products and services.
- To determine how you will promote your product or service to the market that you have chosen.
- To determine what mediums would be best suited for this promotion, such as radio, television or print advertising?
- To determine if a direct response campaign is needed or if an awareness campaign is more appropriate for this type of product/service?
- To determine what other factors need to be considered before launching any campaign(s) designed to increase sales and profits?
- What are some examples of how these steps can be applied to real life situations?
5. Budget
You need a budget to help you plan your e-marketing campaign. It’s not enough to just have a plan and a strategy in place; you need to know how much money you’re going to spend on each aspect of the plan so that you can stay within your budget.
If you don’t have a budget, then it’s too easy for things like the price of media and technology or costs associated with hiring staff to go over budget without anyone realizing it until it’s too late.
Is there a limit to how much is too much – or not enough? Marketing budgets: what you need to know.
- The budgeting process is a crucial part of your marketing plan. There are several marketing strategies you will need to allocate resources to.
- Determine your marketing goals and optimal channels for reaching your target audience before developing a marketing budget.
- The marketing expenditures of small businesses can range from several thousand dollars per year to thousands of dollars per month.
- Developing a marketing budget that delivers results without negatively impacting a business’s bottom line is the goal of this article for entrepreneurs and small business owners.
Every business marketing plan should include a marketing budget – a specific amount allocated to promoting the company’s products and services. If you’re new to marketing investments, it can be difficult to determine a marketing budget. A business’s marketing budget can vary dramatically depending on its industry, location, and goals.
A marketing budget specifies how much should be allocated to staff salaries, office space, equipment, marketing communications, ad design, and specific marketing channels. By aligning marketing strategies with business goals, you can funnel money into marketing campaigns that have the highest return on investment.
You’ll learn how to develop a marketing budget, how to track your marketing budget, and how to evaluate its effectiveness.
A guide to developing a marketing budget
A marketing budget is typically developed by businesses every quarter or every year. Ideally, they should include all the short-term and long-term projects your team is planning to develop.
Setting a marketing budget involves following these four steps.
Identify the marketing goals you wish to achieve.
By building a sales funnel or generating direct sales, marketing increases gross revenue. As part of your marketing strategy’s big picture, you must set short-term and long-term marketing goals and key performance indicators (KPIs).
An example of a short-term goal is:
- By 5%, reduce website bounce rates.
- Make 10 quality comments per week on social media posts.
- Increase brand awareness by generating 100 new followers each month on social media channels.
Long-term goals include:
- Get three of your main focus keywords on the first page of Google.
- Over the next three years, create a sales funnel that consistently generates 20% new customers.
6. Select your marketing channels
There are lots of online marketing channels at your disposal: social media, email, content, your website, and more.
To find the best one for you, you have to know your audience. Where do your customers go online? What do they do when they’re there? Find out what your customers do online, and you’ll find your most effective channels.
This list can be as long or as short as your budget allows. For the best results, focus most of your resources on a handful of channels to make sure they’re effective, and test out other channels to see if they’re worth your time in the future.
Growing a business always involves finding new customers, this may be different segments or markets and may encourage your business to look at product development.
What opportunities are there in your business to:
- Sell more of your existing products or services to your existing customer base? (Market Penetration Strategy)
- Introduce your existing product range to a new customer group? (Market Development Strategy)
- Augment or improve the existing product offer? (Product Development Strategy)
- Move into a new market with a new product offer using the skills within the business? (Diversification Strategies)
Pricing is a critical area in any business. Kotler (1988) described nine marketing mix
strategies on price-quality, which we look at in detail in the Business marketing plan guide for Business members, to support your pricing strategy development.
Our pricing matrix, for Business Members, helps you identify opportunities within your product and pricing strategies. Don’t forget to research which of these strategies are your main competitors using too.
7. List the Tactics and Implementation
A tactical marketing plan is an actionable marketing plan. These are the tasks; the detailed action plan that includes timing and details of all major steps. Tactics include collateral, digital marketing, social media, websites, public relations, and trade shows. Other tactics include conferences, email marketing, word of mouth, direct sales, and lead generation. These are all the things that you will do to accomplish your objectives. This section includes a tactical implementation strategy and/or timeline.
A goal can take a long time to reach, but there are a lot of smaller benchmarks you need to hit along the way.
If you don’t know how your strategy is performing over a month, a week, or whatever, you won’t know if you’re getting close to your goal. When you map out your strategy, you should also have a way to track or monitor it. Google Analytics is a great way to do that, so you have the data you need to alter your strategy to get the best results.
Other Types of Marketing Plan
As the world of digital marketing continues to develop, many find that particular functions within marketing require their planning document. See examples of where this may be useful below:
- New product marketing plan: Launching a new product requires its own planning, this process can be make or break for your product. Find out about the product launch plan that generated $1 billion in 60 days.
- Content strategy: 98% of marketers believe ‘having or following’ a content strategy is ‘important for marketing success’.
- Nich marketing strategy: Niche marketing considers the narrow category into which your business falls and targets specific subsets of customers accordingly.
Conclusion
It is clear that there is a huge competition in the E-Marketing field. There are many new companies are entering this field, but they are not measuring or criteria of success. Just some companies really focus on E-Marketing, so you need to know the steps to make a successful e-marketing plan.
