How to avoid short-sighted marketing? An effective online marketing plan is the best solution. Digital Marketing Plan
Market research process
A first step when it comes to creating an online marketing plan is to analyse the external situation; in other words, observe the competition and the circumstances that surround us and influence our project. What trend is the Internet following? What is the economic situation we are experiencing?
On the other hand, we must also analyse the internal situation, now focussing on the human resources and materials we have available.
Objectives
Every marketing plan is aimed at the achievement of specific objectives. What are we seeking to achieve? To sell a product online or to create a brand? To capture a new market niche? To impact the client?
Strategies
These are defined by the objectives, as they refer to those actions we are going to implement in order to achieve them. Here the optimization or positioning of our website plays a part, thanks to which we will obtain visits. In addition, currently social networks provide the perfect setting for the development of effective strategies. The key lies in knowing how to use them.
When it comes to developing strategies, we must identify the groups of consumers our product targets. If we have an electronic commerce portal for the sale of food products, we must know the profile of our client: housewives or executives with little time to do their shopping in supermarkets?
The strategies are developed around the 4P’s of the marketing mix (product, price, placement, promotion).
Tactics
Represent the most practical part of the online plan. What is sought is:
- Attract new clients. In order to do so, we will use search engines, SEO and SEM; we will embark on email marketing actions, ensuring our clients return to our website; and viral marketing, which fundamentally exploits social networks. In the same manner, we will undertake different forms of advertising (CPC, CPL, CPA and CPM), agreements with third parties and an effective online public relations campaign which must, amongst other functions, establish relations with media outlets (sending our press releases), as well as governmental relations.
- Convert visits. The inscription forms, promotions and forums act as indispensable tools in this phase of the marketing plan.
- Creating customer loyalty. This is nothing other than retaining clients through a contacts plan, segmentation, email marketing and personalisation.
- Establish objective metrics. These are what are known as KPIs (Key Performance indicators), focussed on the quantification of objectives: the number of visits and how many minutes do we want them to remain on our website or what is the level of client satisfaction
Web analytics
Here the role played by Google Analytics is essential as it will provide us with valuable information about web traffic in order that we might evaluate whether our marketing plan is effective or not.
