MarketingPlanWiz Blog: January 2010

If you're one of the enlightened and know that a marketing plan is a good idea, it will come as no surprise that an Internet Marketing Plan is also worth doing, or at least a section on Internet Marketing in your overall plan. Taking this a step further, you can include a social media strategy as part of this.

Back to basics first. The main components of an Internet Marketing Plan are:

How you will use your website as a marketing tool
Distributing news and press releases online
Social networking (blogs, social networks such as Facebook, MySpace), YouTube, forums and wikis (such as Wikipedia).
Online advertising (pay per click, banners)
Email marketing
Viral marketing
Search engine optimisation

Even if you can't address all of these in one go, they should be on your radar for relevance. But knowing that these exist isn't enough - here are my top ten reasons to draft an Internet Marketing Plan:

The UK market for email marketing platforms and services was worth £254million in 2008 and was predicted to grow by an estimate 15% to £292 million by the end of 2009, a trend which is continuing - they do this because it works.
It's very low cost compared to traditional marketing in almost every case
All content that you put out onto the internet will still be there next year and the year after and that means it will continued to be found by search engines. Not like a printed advert, here today and gone tomorrow.
All Internet marketing is measurable and the stats don't lie. Use Google Analytics to see how much traffic came from your Facebook page or Twitter.
Our customers buying behaviour has changed - they use the internet now to research, learn, review and make buying decisions.
Google received 299 million search requests globally in just May 2009. In 2009 $58.1 billion was spent on online advertising across the world - that accounts for 13.2% of advertising spend worldwide. If you're going to use paid advertising doing it online is budget controlled, can be stopped at any moment - and very targeted.
Your website is your shop window. Even if your customers don't buy from it they will check you out here first. If you do nothing else, this must be up-to-date otherwise your competitors may get the business - can you afford to take that risk?
It's not just young people who use the Internet. Facebook's fastest growing demographic is people over 30.
The more places you publish information and interact online, the more links there will be back to your website - part of your search engine optimisation!
Your customers are there already: Of the 36.9 million UK Internet users in May 2009, 29.4 million visited at least one social networking website.