E-Marketing planning tips for 2011 to help your business

What’s on your marketing plan for 2011? Most businesses have an idea of how important E-marketing (also called internet marketing) is, but many either don’t have a clear strategy or a concrete plan. Putting the time in to plan for activities that can produce results now will yield results for the year to come.

Before diving into the possibilities for your E-marketing plan, let’s briefly touch on marketing plans in general. Not having a written marketing plan, regardless of the size of your business, is a plan to fail. Marketing plans must act as both a plan for the months to come (I prefer a 12 month plan) and a business intelligence tool to report on what’s worked, to what degree, and what should be changed.

Plans should include a healthy mix of marketing strategies that you know to work from past efforts and new strategies you are testing. They should list the pertinent details like:

• Strategy name

• Target market (demographic)

• Quantity

• Cost

• Measurables (website visits, calls, leads, conversions to sale – more granular levels allow more precise analysis and testing)

• Return on investment

Even marketing strategies known to work need to be reported on consistently, as you should be pushing the more successful strategies until you find the point of diminishing return.

Here are some of the top performing E-marketing strategies to consider. Don’t try to take on too many at the same time. Always try to add one or two strategies to your overall marketing plan at a time, testing them against existing strategies and eliminating weaker performing ones.

• Websites – this is a big category, and can include static websites, blogs, landing pages, squeeze pages, and more. A blog is likely your best addition if you don’t already have one. Blogs are well built for search engine optimising, easy to set up and use, and inexpensive to run.

• Article Marketing – writing quality original content and publishing it across the web is a powerful strategy for link building, which is critical for search engine optimisation (SEO) and traffic generation.

• Linkbuilding – building links from other sites to yours is the key to off site SEO.

• Social Media – social media is an important strategy because it gives you exposure to the hundreds of million users spending their time on the sites and also because it is a powerful tool for branding and engagement with your customers. Facebook and Twitter are the big players, but also watch the geolocation sites like Foursquare also offer great opportunities.

• Press Releases – don’t consider using press release sites as a way to send marketing messages, but if you have PR-worthy news, by all means utilize the cost-effective tools for submitting your press releases online.

Posted in: Business Online, Marketing