Louis DantilHow To Successfully Market Your Business Online
Updated: Feb 13
The Step-by-Step Marketing Plan For Your Business
Content
The Step-by-Step Marketing Plan
· Set your marketing goals,
· Conduct a marketing audit,
· Conduct market research,
· Analyze the research,
· Identify your target audience,
· Determine a budget,
· Develop specific marketing strategies,
· Develop an implementation schedule for the strategies and
· Create an evaluation process.
How To Successfully Market Your Business Online
Know your niche
Develop clear insight into why a potential customer would use your business
Identify competitors that would also want your target customers
Leverage you brand position (values) for your target customers
Evaluate, audit and measure your plan
Definitely,
Valuable resources to Successfully market your business
You need to have a business website
Optimize your website for SEO
Create useful video tutorials on YouTube (Free)
Email Marketing (Free and Paid)
Create a blog and post high-quality content regularly
Market your content on Medium and Quora
Take advantage of Pinterest and Tumblr
Use press releases to communicate important company news or events
Use business listing sites like Yahoo Local and Google Local
Collaborate with popular bloggers in your niche
Run Google Ads
Get online customer reviews
Embrace social media
Join a relevant online community and contribute
Introduction
There are the major steps required to develop a well-crafted, strategic online marketing plan.
They are not necessarily having to be as such but, these will and guide through the path for a successful marketing plan.
Keep reading!
1. The Step-by-Step Marketing Plan For Your Business
· Set your marketing goals,
· Conduct a marketing audit,
· Conduct market research,
· Analyze the research,
· Identify your target audience,
· Determine a budget,
· Develop specific marketing strategies,
· Develop an implementation schedule for the strategies and
· Create an evaluation process.
Set your marketing goals
Before starting, you must have a purpose for it. Your objectives should be measurable over a period of time. You need to set realistic and measurable goals to achieve over the next 18 to 24 months. This time span allows you to plan activities around community events that are in line with your marketing goals.
Conduct a marketing audit
In another word, you have to analyze your situation based on the SWOT: A Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. The marketing audit is a review of all marketing activities that have occurred in your practice over the past three years.
Be as thorough as possible, making sure to review every announcement, advertisement, phonebook ad, open house, brochure and seminar and evaluate whether it was successful.
Make sure you analyze the economy, your competitors, technology, and other external factors contribute to your opportunities and threats.
Know the market
How you do that? By conducting a market research to draw a realistic picture of your practice, the community you practice in and your current position in that community.
With this research, you can make fairly accurate projections about future growth in the community, identify competitive factors and explore nontraditional opportunities. You also have to analyze the research which will reveal your practice’s strategic advantages.
After looking closely at your own practice as well as your competitors’, you can ask yourself some key questions: What are the similarities and differences between your practice and your competitors’?
What sets your practice apart from your competition? Is your location more desirable than your competitors’? Do you offer a broader scope of services than the competition?
Know your audience
How? Make sure you identify your target audience. First of all, your target audience is the specific group of patients to which you’d like to direct your marketing efforts to.
Make sure you know their age, gender, location, what they like, what are their needs, payer type or language/ethnicity and patients with certain clinical needs.
Define your messages
Your messaging is part of your marketing strategy and your brand and, center elements messaging related to your products, clients, and services.
You definitely have to outline your tactics. including both online and offline options. Focus on the one you work out.
However, your goals, target audience, and industry factor into this decision have to the in the center of the tactics. Once you’ve selected your tactics, list them in your marketing plan and determine how they’ll help you reach your goals.
Determine a budget
All marketing strategy requires a marketing budgets which vary by the type of market a practice is in, the age of a practice and whether the practice has marketed before.
Creating a budget for your marketing strategies can inform your efforts by determining what you can and can’t afford. Choosing the most cost-effective options for your business ensures the success of your overall marketing plan.
Set timeline and schedule
Your time is precious, especially when it comes to your marketing strategies. Based on the goals and objectives you’ve set for your business, create a timeline that will determine what will be completed and when.
Develop an implementation Schedule by showing which marketing actions will be done when and by whom.
The schedule should also include the cost of each marketing action and how it fits into the budget estimates for the time period.
The implementation schedule will also give you a basis on which to monitor the progress of your marketing plan.
Evaluate and measure your results
An evaluation process is key as it will help you to measure your results against the standards you set in establishing your goals. Measuring the effectiveness of your marketing strategies will inform your current plan and your future efforts.
Your website, social media, and other marketing materials are sources of this information. Review your plan periodically by comparing your progress with the implementation schedule.
2. How to Create a Great Online Business Marketing Plan
Know your niche
Develop clear insight into why a potential customer would use your business
Identify competitors that would also want your target customers
Leverage you brand position (values) for your target customers
Evaluate, audit and measure your plan
Definitively,
Know your niche
As clear as you hear it. You need to find and understand your niche.
Develop clear insight into why a potential customer would use your business
According to Robert J. Thomas, a marketing professor at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University, you have to figure out the core need that your product or service will meet
Identify competitors that would also want your target customers
Knowing who your competitors are, what their core competitive advantages and how they will respond to your offering (price cuts, increased communication, etc.) will help you figure out strategies to combat such losses.
Leverage you brand position (values) for your target customers
You should be able to write down a simple declarative sentence of how you will meet customer needs and beat the competition. According to Thomas, your brand and what it symbolizes for customers will be your strongest competitive advantage.
Evaluate, audit and measure your plan
The value of a marketing plan is its effectiveness, which requires deliberate and timely implementation and monitoring and evaluation of results.
Definitively,
Your Business Marketing plan can be the key to success in any field, no matter the offering. Inadequate planning almost guarantees failure.
3. Best Free and Paid Ways To Market Your Business Online
You need to have a business website
Optimize your website for SEO
Create useful video tutorials on YouTube (Free)
Email Marketing (Free and Paid)
Create a blog and post high-quality content regularly
Market your content on Medium and Quora
Take advantage of Pinterest and Tumblr
Use press releases to communicate important company news or events
Use business listing sites like Yahoo Local and Google Local
Collaborate with popular bloggers in your niche
Run Google Ads
Get online customer reviews
Embrace social media
Join a relevant online community and contribute
You need to have a business website
The first step is to get your business online. How you will do it depends on your budget and the type of website you want to create but the general principles you should follow are:
· Host your website on a reliable hosting provider
· Don’t forget that your website represents your business image.
· Make sure that your website loads as fast as
· Mobile friendly
· Provide information about your business, products, or services
Get your own domain name
Optimize your website for SEO
This is my number one resource. Keep in mind it is not easy but, with hard work, you will get it done. You also have to keep in mind is that if your business is new, you’re going to have a hard time ranking at the top of Google's SERPs for any keyword that's marginally competitive. You have to go for low competitive keywords.
Create useful video tutorials on YouTube (Free)
YouTube offers a great resource for marketing your business on the web. While you might find some friction at the outset for building your audience, if you focus on creating useful video tutorials, eventually, you'll reach a vast amount of people. Make sure you add value without much concern for generating profit.
Email Marketing (Free and Paid)
Email marketing is not always easy. However, it is something that every business owner should be engaged it. To succeed with email marketing, you need to give something away for free in exchange for the consumer's email address. It needs to be something of value. Then, develop a relationship with that consumer through drip-fed campaigns using a system like Aweber, Get Response, Constant Contact or Mailchimp.
Create a blog and post high-quality content regularly
It is a must have and the most important way you can market your business online is to build a blog where you can post and share high-quality content that adds an exceeding high amount of value on a regular basis.
Check out the multiple ways you can earn money with a blog.
Market your content on Medium and Quora
If you're looking to get some early traffic, and you have a fairly new, you should work on marketing your content on sites like Medium and Quora. Write one high-quality piece of content on your website.
Make sure it's keyword-centric, insightful, unique and adds a lot of value. Ensure that whatever you're talking about helps people in some way, shape or form. This will drive a lot of traffic to your site.
Take advantage of Pinterest and Tumblr
Among others, they are a high-domain authority sites that you can post photos and videos on to drive traffic to your site.
Use press releases to communicate important company news or events
Press releases aren't going to get you immediate media coverage. While some media professionals will use outlets such as Help a Reporter, or even scour press release sites such as PR Web, you're likely not going to get any type of instant news coverage by putting out a press release.
Use business listing sites like Yahoo Local and Google Local
If you're running a local business and looking to attract nearby customers to a brick-and-mortar location or offering some professional service that's geographically-specific, you should list your business on local business listing sites such as Yahoo Local and Google Local.
Collaborate with popular bloggers in your niche
A great way to make this happen is to offer your services as a guest blogger. Clearly, you'll have to have a good background in writing yourself, and it might be difficult to find a popular blog willing to allow you to do this, but it would be worth a shot if you eventually secure a guest post.
Run Google Ads
While SEO will help you to get to the top of results pages, it is a long-term strategy that can take weeks, even months to start seeing results. For more immediate exposure, and if you have the budget, Google Ads is the way to go. Google Ads ads show up at the very top of search engine results pages, above organic and local listings.
Get online customer reviews
Word of mouth is one of, perhaps the most, powerful way of promoting your business to the right people. Testimonials on your own website are great, but reviews on official platforms like Google, Facebook, and Yelp are even better.
Embrace social media
Social media isn't just a tool to gain exposure—it has now become a necessary time investment for every business to make. You can tie in ads and offers on your Facebook page and have a direct channel with your customers on Twitter. Networking on LinkedIn—both at the personal and company level—can be another way to help your startup.
Join a relevant online community and contribute
Every niche has communities online that you can get involved in. But just signing up for a forum and posting every once in a while, about your business isn't beneficial for anyone, and will likely just annoy people. Actively contribute and build a rapport with the community, while keeping your business out of it. Passively promote your business by putting a link in your signature or mentioning it only when the context is appropriate.
Tell us in a comment, which of these strategy will be the first to implement in your marketing plan!