For a business to succeed on the net, it is not enough to create a web page. You need to provide confidence, get closer to the public and offer content of value to them. Therefore, for a company, institution or product to succeed on the Internet, it will be necessary to develop a online marketing plan.
What is an online marketing plan?
The online marketing plan is an elementary tool that should be used by any market-oriented company or institution that wants to be competitive. In this plan, the different actions that must be carried out in the field of marketing must be established, in order to achieve certain objectives. The marketing plan must be perfectly coordinated and in line with the strategic planbeing on many occasions necessary to make changes with respect to the general plan of the company.
It is very important the planning. Without an action plan, every action has a high risk of failure or at least a great waste of resources and efforts. We could say that trying to get a project to work online without using a online marketing plan It’s like trying to reach an unknown destination without a map or GPS to guide us.
The online marketing plan It provides a clear vision of the final objective and what is to be achieved along the way to go, as well as the details of the situation in which it finds itself, marking the stages that must be addressed. It will provide important and necessary data such as how long it takes to cover each stage, so that an estimated time can be set, what personnel must be allocated to achieve the objectives and what economic resources must be allocated.
Without the preparation of an online marketing plan, it will not be known if the objectives and results of a company, service or institution on the network have been achieved.
How to develop an online marketing plan?
The role of marketing in this global plan involves the development of a sequential process with a series of phases that lead us to achieve the ultimate goal of building strong and profitable relationships with customers. Therefore, the basic points that a good online marketing plan must integrate are the following:
-
Analysis of the situation:
The purpose of the situation analysis is to evaluate the company in relation to its environment, obtaining all the information necessary for more efficient decision-making. Therefore, it is essential to carry out an external and internal analysis.
In the external analysis, those factors that make up the environment and the context in which the company carries out its activity will be investigated. It consists of several analyses:
PEST analysis: It is a matrix that identifies the Political, Economic, Social and Technological factors of the company’s macro environment.
Market analysis: qualitative study that collects the most relevant aspects of the size, the user and the trends of the online market where the company or institution operates.
Analysis of the microenvironment and the competitive environment: This is the analysis of the strategies and actions in the online field of a selection of suppliers, intermediaries, the competition and other interest groups.
The internal analysis is made up of the investigation of the resources and capacities of the company, that is, the evaluation of aspects of marketing, production, finance, organization in order to detect the strong and weak points that may give rise to advantages or disadvantages.
We are talking here about the following analyses, more focused on an online environment:
Web Audit: topics such as , navigability, web design and . Tools like: , Woorank, SEOmoz etc. can be useful.
Audit of communication channels: measure the views, comments reached in the different communication channels used online, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or the website, or blog through the statistics that different tools allow us.
Realization of the : it is a study methodology through which the weaknesses, strengths, threats and opportunities of the company can be identified. This method is essential in your online marketing plan since it will collect in a schematic way what is reflected in the internal and external analysis, pointing out the potentialities, limitations, risks and challenges that your company faces. He will serve in the future for goal setting.
-
Establishment of objectives:
they can be very diverse, so we must establish priorities and plan in detail what we want to achieve. These constitute the most critical part of your online marketing plan. The strategy and actions to be carried out will depend on these objectives. In addition, these online marketing objectives must have a direct relationship with the general objectives of the company or business, so they must be consistent with what you are and what you want to become beyond the network.
Between the goals of an online marketing plan where are the sales, to what public do you want to address, how are we going to achieve it, the dissemination of company information or increase visits to the website. All this must be specific, measurable, realistic and with reasonable deadlines for execution.
-
Strategy design:
A large number of strategies and tactics can be developed to achieve the set objectives. The key to making your marketing plan work is to identify the most effective strategies to achieve the results you have set.
We can divide the objectives depending on whether what you are looking for is attract, convert or retain to your target audience since in this way we will have a panoramic view that will help the choice of strategies.
Attract the customer: we can use strategic lines such as search engine marketing ( and ), online advertising, marketing, email marketing or use online PR.
Converting the customer: through web strategies improving usability and design, using online advertising, acquiring customers through .
Build customer loyalty: through emails, etc.
Strategies are made up of actions, which must be specified and described in the online marketing plan to bring order to said actions.
-
Evaluation, measurement of results:
We must evaluate if the elaborated strategies are achieving the stated objectives or if, on the contrary, they are not giving results and we must reorient the actions for a correct effectiveness. Therefore, a series of indicators that is, some measurement parameters or K Pls for each strategic line that allows us to monitor to ensure compliance with the online marketing plan and verify that the planned objectives are being achieved.
-
Budget:
Throughout online marketing plan You must indicate the amount of money you want to invest in order to prepare a balance of expenses and income for the time that said plan will be considered. It is not recommended to exceed three years. In fact, thinking of an Online Marketing Plan, the most realistic thing is that you have to review it every year, although working on it over three years is a good theoretical planning exercise.
Each strategic line will be assigned an expense item and a forecast of the income you expect to obtain, to later develop a profitability threshold and an ROI approximation that you will begin to generate once the proposed objectives begin to be met.
As we have seen a online marketing plan It is made up of several important factors to take into account for a company, business or institution to succeed in the network. Not only is it worth having a mere online presence, but the information that you want to share with the target audience must be channeled through strategies that will start from objectives whose purpose will be the construction of strong and profitable relationships with customers.
Stay informed of the most relevant news on our news channel
Facebook Comments
Disqus