If you have not yet developed a marketing plan for your website, now is the time. You should have KPIs and goals in place, including organic traffic, social media traffic, referral traffic, email traffic, and paid advertising. In your plan, you should also create pages to attract traffic through popular channels like Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, and Google+. Your marketing strategy should also include a timeline. If you are unsure how to begin, follow these steps:
Content pillars
When you’re creating a marketing plan, it’s important to start with the overarching topic. The topic should be related to your business or brand, and it should address the audience’s interests, pain points, and buyer’s journey. To create content that will be useful to your audience, read some top-ranked blog posts on the topic and develop a topic outline. You can also focus on your area of expertise and provide valuable content for your audience.
For example, if your content focuses on bankruptcy, you can create a long-form blog post that addresses the question, “What is bankruptcy?” Alternatively, you can break the topic down into several subtopics, grouped by linked table of contents. Each subtopic is then covered in greater detail. You can also use visual elements that are optimized for social media and email marketing. These can help you promote pillar content in the most effective way.
Four main P’s
A good marketing plan incorporates the Four P’s to sell a product. The marketing mix should include demographics, price, promotion, and place. Each of the P’s plays a part in creating a profile of your target consumer. Here are some questions to ask to create this profile:
Place: Where does your product or service live? Is it on a retail store shelf? If so, how do you reach it? How do you get it in front of your target audience? Do you have incentive programs to encourage them to buy? Promotion strategies can include anything that gets your product in front of potential customers. Many new businesses tend to rush into all sorts of promotion methods without ever thinking about how they’ll benefit their customers. But even if you have a great promotional strategy, if you can’t promote your product properly, you’re wasting your time and money.
Place: Promotion is another important part of marketing. Make sure your product is well-known in the area you want to market to. This means you should outline your advertising channels and create a public relations plan. Research competitor’s products and their location. You’ll also need to know where your product is located. If you can’t find it on Amazon, you’re going to have trouble getting your products noticed.
Key performance indicators
A marketing plan is useless without a set of key performance indicators (KPIs). These are the metrics used to gauge the efficiency of the company and its marketing activities. By tracking these KPIs, marketing professionals can monitor the effectiveness of different channels, as well as determine the most effective budget spending strategies. To ensure that your marketing plan is successful, you must understand the purpose of each KPI and then create it based on your business objectives.
The KPIs must be specific, relevant, measurable, attainable, time-bound, and based on legitimate data. Your business objectives will determine which KPIs are most important. Once you’ve identified the metrics that will best help you achieve your goals, it’s time to select a marketing campaign. A KPI is the most effective tool in measuring your business’s performance. This is especially true if you’re trying to improve the quality of your business’ customer service, overall experience, and reputation.
Timeline
A timeline of marketing goals displays the sequential order of strategies and objectives. Various types of timelines exist, such as flowcharts, graphs, and charts. Each one offers a different perspective, but they all have some essential elements. Below are some tips for creating an effective timeline:
Start with a template. You can customize a timeline template by entering your information in the fields provided. Most marketing timeline templates are customizable, so you can change the details to suit your business. You can also download related marketing templates for free. A template for an annual marketing plan, for example, gives a year-to-date view of the marketing plan. This template also accounts for seasonal considerations. For more detailed versions, you can also use an online marketing platform such as Smartsheet.
When implementing a marketing plan, remember that different tactics will take different amounts of time. A social media campaign may take a longer time than a blog. Make sure to set aside the time required for each of these tactics. Then, keep an eye on the results of the various campaigns. This way, you can adjust your plan if necessary. Make sure you include metrics in your plan so that you can see whether or not your strategies are working.
