An Internet marketing outline guides a company step-by-step how to market its product or service to a specific target market and it helps a company remain focused on its marketing objectives.
Your Internet Marketing Plan will define all of the components of your marketing strategy. You will address the details of your market analysis, sales, and public relations campaigns. The most successful Internet marketing plans integrate both Internet marketing strategies as well as traditional (offline) marketing strategies.
The Topics You Need to Discuss in Your Internet Marketing Plan include:
1. Online Market Research
Collect, organize, and write down data about the online market that is currently offering parking services. Some areas to consider:
• Market dynamics – patterns including seasonality and competition;
• Customers – demographics, market segment, target markets, needs, buying decisions;
• Service – what’s out there now and what's the competition offering? Conduct market research by going to Google.com and Bing.com to conduct searches on the types of services you are providing;
• Current trends in the airport parking industry;
• Aggregators – who, why, where and what is happening in your market;
• Target Market(s) – to be successful, focus on one or two small niche markets instead of a large general market. Niche markets have far less competition and they tend to be more profitable. If there is one thing you can do to help your odds of being successful in business it is to focus on one or two small niche markets.
2. Online Competition
Describe your competition. Develop your "unique selling proposition." What makes you stand apart from your competition? Why are you special? Why should a customer choose to do business with you instead of one of your competitors? The better job you can do to differentiate yourself from your competitors, the more success you will have.
3. Online Marketing Strategies
Write down the Internet marketing and promotion strategies that you want to use or at least consider using. Strategies to consider include:
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO). What this means is using optimization techniques so search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo) will rank your website within the top 10 search results. By doing this you can get literally thousands of people to your website every day for free;
• Video Search Engine Optimization (VSEO). Similar to SEO, it is equally important to optimize a short video on the top video search engines (YouTube, Google-Video, Yahoo-Video);
• Pay Per Click (PPC) Search Engine Marketing. When you use this service you are bidding on keywords so that your website text ad is displayed when a person conducts a search on a particular keyword or key phrase. Google and Bing offer PPC programs. It is recommended to point these ad links to a supporting landing page;
• Channel Marketing. This is where other partner websites market your services for your business for either a discounted rate or a commission on each sale. This is an outstanding way to create a successful Internet business;
• Email Marketing. There are ten steps to a successful email marketing campaign. We will discuss first six in this piece and the rest later. Here are the ten:
Step 1: Consolidating Your Names
Step 2: Build Your List of Email Addresses
Step 3: Develop Your Email Campaign Mix
Step 4: Write Your Emails
Step 5: Choose Your Recipients
Step 6: Send Your Email Blast
Step 7: Process Opt-Outs
Step 8: Process Bounced Emails
Step 9: Follow Up
Step 10: Refine and Repeat
• Link Exchanges. This is where you and other websites exchanges links to drive traffic to each other’s website. Exchanging links with other websites is also a great way to get better rankings in the search engines. The reason for this is that search engines want to give top rankings to the websites that are most popular in their category/industry. The best way for the search engines to determine which websites are the most popular is to see who has the most links pointing at their website. That is why getting a lot of links pointing at your website is so important;
• Write Articles and distribute them online. This is a great way to get tons of one-way links pointed at your website (which search engines love!). Again, the more links that point at your website, the higher search engines will rank your website. And, if getting tons of links pointing at your website wasn't enough, writing articles will also send targeted traffic to your website and it will make you an expert in your field. The way it works is very simple. You write a 1-page article and use online article distribution services to distribute your article to hundreds of other websites, blogs, and ezines (electronic magazines). People then read your articles to learn about your services. The best two services to use for distributing your article are Ezine Articles and Isnare;
• Write press releases and distribute them online. Just like writing and submitting articles, this is a very simple and extremely effective way to get tons of links pointed at your website. It is also a great way drive targeted traffic to your website. For more information, please visit PRWeb.com;
• Network. Use social networking services like MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkeIn.
4. Pricing, Positioning and Branding
From the information collected, establish strategies for determining the price of your service, where your service is positioned in the market and how you will achieve brand awareness in your community.
5. Budget
Budget your dollars. What strategies can you afford? How much can you afford to spend per month?
6. Marketing Goals
Establish quantifiable marketing goals. This means goals that you can turn into results. For instance, your goal might be to gain at least 10 new clients each month or to generate 100 reservations per month.
7. Monitor Your Results
Test and analyze. Identify the strategies that are producing the most customers and which are producing the least customers.
• Survey customers;
• Track sales, leads, visitors to your web site, per cent of conversions to impressions;
• Measure Return on Investment per each marketing activity.
In summary, over ten years ago I read a book from Intel's CEO called "Only The Paranoid Survive". Although I can remember many of the intriguing messages in the book, one stands out from all the rest. Irregardless of size, a company's business strategy must compliment its internet strategy by delivering a real-time value proposition, or face losing market share and positioning.
