An online marketing plan helps us define our action steps and organize our marketing strategy implementation.
When creating it, several departments in the organization must be involved. For example: administration, for data about the manufacturing process and all associated costs. Then there's the marketing team, for customer avatar, competitor, and market analysis. Next comes accounting, for data on manufacturing and distribution costs, as well as any other direct and indirect expenses that can seriously influence organizational costs.
What does a robust online marketing plan include?
- Full Business and Niche Analysis
Here are some helpful questions to help you determine your customer avatar:
- How old is the avatar?
- Where does the avatar live?
- Is he a woman or a man?
- What are the avatar's purposes?
- What are the avatar values?
- What is the avatar's family situation?
- How many children does the avatar have and how old are they?
- What are the most important features of the avatar on a personal level?
Competitor analysis - a SWOT analysis will help you identify your company's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats compared to 4-5 relevant competitors, thus understanding your next steps. Then list your differentiators – write down what your competitive advantages are: Why should customers choose you over your competitors?
- Setting goals
It's time to set our goals. They must be designed to be realistic, achievable, and effective, created according to the SMART model (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-bound). Here are the types of marketing goals we can set: creating a community around our brand, determining the communication channels that work in our niche and our daily lives, and creating a database of qualified leads.
- Choice of action strategies
Once we have defined the objectives, it is also very important to have the action steps expected for each particular objective. This is how we will help the entire marketing team to do their job flawlessly. The targetologist will know how to identify the objective of the advertisement, but also how the achievement of the objective will be achieved. The copywriter will know exactly who and why they are addressing with a commercial message. The designer will know what mood and emotion he wants to evoke in the target audience, etc.
- Implementation of the marketing plan
With the to-do list penciled in, we can move on to step-by-step planning. That is: to set responsibility, we can write tasks and define deadlines for each of them.
- Evaluation and Control
In the online environment, everything is measured, to understand whether we have achieved our goals or not. We need to evaluate the results of our work and formulate relevant conclusions.