We often hear our prospective clients ask for a ‘nice looking’ website that they can then use as a part of their Marketing strategy.

In reality there is a proper order strategies should be used in any business such as:

Creating a Business Plan.

That is another blog in its own right – so for now let’s assume you have already done one of these.  If not – follow this link to the Australian Government Business website where you can download guides and templates for free – it includes guides to setting up a Budget, Balance Sheets, etc.;

http://www.business.gov.au/Howtoguides/Thinkingofstartingabusiness/Whatplanningtoolscanhelpme/Pages/Businessplanguidesandtemplates.aspx

Mission Statement.

Make sure you have one of these created at the same time as your Business Plan.  The previous link has a template;

http://www.business.gov.au/Documents/BusinessPlanTemplate.doc

Marketing Plan. 

This needs to be drawn up before you get your website designed (or redesigned if working on rebranding your image).  The following link from the Australian Government Business website will give you a free template if you don’t have one already;

http://www.business.gov.au/Documents/MarketingPlanTemplateandGuide.doc

Now that we have the ‘chicken-and-egg’ stuff out of the way, let’s look specifically at the Marketing Plan – of which internet marketing will usually be just one component.


Creating a Marketing Plan

The purpose of the marketing plan is to assists you to integrate your total marketing effort – this should ensure your products and services are aligned to your customers’ needs.

When writing it you need to be clear about your objectives and how you'll achieve them. A good marketing plan sets clear, realistic and measurable objectives, includes deadlines, provides a budget and allocates responsibilities.

A plan can consist of these elements:

• Analysis of your current market.
• Your business objectives.
• Key strategies.
• Steps to achieving your objectives.
• Proposed budget.
• Timing.

It is a living process that should be reviewed and updated continuously throughout the life of your business.

Some of the keys steps to include when putting your Marketing Plan together include:

1. Make sure your short and long term goals are aligned with your Mission Statement.
2. Know who your target market is.
3. Finances. Work out what you can afford to spend marketing your business and what the return on investment will be.
4. Complete a SWOT analysis of your business – i.e., the products and services you have, where you sit in the market, what is unique about what you sell, your pricing strategy, anticipated demand for what you sell, value to the customer, and potential for growth. Much of this section relates to your ‘brand’ – the things that identify your products and services to customers and prospective customers.
5. How your sales and marketing teams will work to support and achieve your plans.
6. How do you rate against competitors?
7. What environmental, industry and political impacts are there for your business, your products and services and the customers that buy from you?

How to integrate Internet Marketing into your overall Marketing Plan

Now that you have put together a proper Marketing Plan we need to talk about how your website fits into that plan to make the most of its potential as a part of both your marketing strategies and as a part of your sales force – and ultimately, your cash flow.

One of our pet hates poorly functioning business websites. This can be due to a number of factors such as:

• Cramming in too much info.  Keep it simple folks.
• Not including all current products and services.
• Incorrect pricing.
• Wrong contact details – names, phone numbers, addresses, etc.
• Poor use of graphics – or nil use of graphics not optomised for SEO.
• Nil or poor online Shopping function check out Magento or Ebay
• Lack of links with social network sites. Facebook, tiwtter and linkedin
• Poor use of Search Engine Optmisation (SEO).
• No usage of Analytics or coversion setup
• Spelling mistakes.
• No encouragement to purchase and no follow up

The biggest contributor to why so many websites get it wrong is in understanding who the website is for – remember;  it is there for the customer so that they provide you with leads and/or sales and not to satisfy the ego of having a visually ‘pretty’ website. It’s about generating you income and ongoing business and not to just stroke egos.

Remember, what probably counts the most is that your business generates profit.  Your website needs to be an important part of the profit generating process within your business.

As well as being aligned to your overall Marketing Plan the Internet Marketing Plan also needs to have Website design (or usability) as an integral part of it.  It is no good just getting people to your website – you need them to do what you want them to do.  Poor design, content issues, or lack of clarity all play a big part lack of usability.  Get it right and you will attract new customers as well as retain your existing customer base.

We have talked in a previous blog about the importance of SEO to the success of your web traffic – and ultimately to sales. It cannot be stressed too highly that every business needs to have a regular review of SEO to ensure that they are current with generating as much traffic as possible to the website.  Having an external SEO specialist on monthly contract is often the best way of doing this – a fresh pair of eyes working independent from your business, but through building up a strong working relationship, understands how to maximize SEO specifically for your business.

However, you need to have all areas of your business operating effectively to support the online side of your business.  Having great Search Engine results and Rankings are pointless if your website and sales, support and customer service don’t reflect the same level of quality as the ranking imply.

Consider too the relevance to your business of having Blogs and other Social Media Marketing such as Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, etc and whether things such as Google AdSense, AdWords have a place in the Marketing Plan – and therefore need to be incorporated in with any development of your website. If using Blogs as a marketing/communication mechanism be sure to link them with as many Social Media sites as possible (not just the few mentioned above) – they can increase the traffic to your site many times over and therefore, the greater the traffic the greater the potential of landing a new customer.

Another good way to start gathering information about your website visitors is on-site registration – i.e., getting them to register/subscribe to on-line newsletters or your blogs.  Make sure that you use this information wisely – visitors are very wary of spam these days, so don’t bombard them and abuse the relationship.