If you’re looking for ways to grow your business online, you’ve most likely considered creating an online marketing plan (OEMP). An online marketing plan can help you discover the most effective strategies for marketing your product or service online which in turn can help you reach your target audience and ideally make more sales.
An online marketing plan can help you figure out what types of content to create and distribute across multiple platforms. Moreover, an online marketing plan can serve as a road map for measuring the success of your marketing efforts. This article will teach you how to create an online marketing plan template that you can use for your business.
The Importance of a Business Plan
One of the most important things to consider when creating an online marketing plan is the value that your target audience places on your product or service. You can never know this for certain, but you can find out a lot by analyzing the types of content that your ideal customer consumes. Moreover, creating a business plan will help you identify your business’ goals and the roles that you need to play to reach those goals.
Having a business plan will also make it much easier for you to get loans and secure venture capital, as investors will have a better understanding of your business’ value. Despite the many advantages that a business plan offers, it is not a requirement for starting a business. Moreover, the business plan does not need to be extensive. In fact, you can use a simple plan to start with and then add more detail as you progress.
The Three Ps of Digital Marketing
To get the most out of your online marketing plan, you need to focus on three areas:
- Product
- Place
- Promotion
Each of these areas can be explored in much more detail, but for now, just understand that they are key areas that you must cover in any online marketing plan. Your product is what you’re selling; for example, if you run an online store, your product might be the shirts, pants, or other clothing items that you sell. Your place is where you sell your product; for example, if you have an eCommerce store, your place might be the website where you house all of your products. Your promotion is how you draw traffic to your place, whether it’s SEO, paid marketing, ads, or social media; it’s all about bringing people to your website, whether it’s now or eventually.
Each of these areas is important, and you must consider how you’ll go about promoting your product or service in each area. Moreover, you must put the effort in now to figure out how you’ll promote your product or service, as later on you’ll find it much more difficult to figure out what worked and what didn’t.
Create a Marketing Mix
A marketing mix is a combination of marketing techniques used to promote a product or service. The marketing mix is made up of three parts:
- Product
- Place
- Promotion
The first part of the marketing mix is the product; this is the part that you, as the entrepreneur, will be focusing on. Your product is what you’re creating, and it’s unique to your business. Moreover, you should consider creating a value-packed product that will appeal to as many people as possible. For example, if you’re in the clothing business, your product might be the t-shirts that you design or the underlayers that you manufacture. The main purpose of the product is to provide value to your target audience, and in doing so, you’ll increase the likelihood of making a sale.
The second part of the marketing mix is the place. Your place is the medium through which you promote your product or service; it can be either physical or digital. Since we’re always on the go nowadays, having a physical place to promote your product is crucial. This can take the form of a storefront — whether that’s in the form of a shopify store, woocommerce store, facebook shop, or any other eCommerce platforms — or it can simply take the form of a website. If you’ve got a brick-and-mortar business, you might choose to use online platforms to allow your customers to reach you wherever they want. For example, you could have a shopify store for selling fashion accessories and clothing, while running ads on facebook for your retail business.
As for the third part of the marketing mix, your promotion, you need to consider how you’ll promote your product or service. There are various techniques that you can use, such as SEO, pay-per-click advertising, or organic social media marketing. For most businesses, SEO is the first line of defense, as it is inexpensive, easy to implement, and offers near-instantaneous results. In addition to this, many businesses use various tools to track the success of their SEO strategies which enable them to track the effectiveness of their marketing efforts in real-time.
Put It All Together
Once you know what your product is and what role it plays in your business, you can begin to develop an online marketing plan. To start with, make a list of all of the platforms that you’ll use to promote your product. This can include websites, blogs, and social media outlets like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
Once you’ve got the list, you can begin to develop a blueprint for your online marketing strategy. This process will involve thinking through the three parts of the marketing mix outlined above and putting each part into practice. To start, you can use the list of platforms that you’ve created to brainstorm ideas for content.
The next step is to research the audiences that you’ll be targeting for your product. If you want to create an eCommerce store, you’ll need to focus on affluent, young women between the ages of 18 and 34 whom you can convert into buyers. To attract this demographic, use keywords and key phrases in all of your content, and make sure to include these keywords in the copy you write for your website.
As for the products that you’ll use to attract people to your website, you can use various platforms to compare pricing, deliverability, and other factors to choose the best one for your business.
An Example of an Online Marketing Plan
To get a better idea of how an online marketing plan should look, let’s look at an example.
- Product: hoodies and sweatshirts
- Place: Online marketplace
- Promotion: SEO, paid social media, and display advertising
The product that we’ll be focusing on here is hoodies and sweatshirts. These are warm and waterproof garments that you wear to protect yourself from the rain or snow. If you’re looking to create a winter sportswear brand, this product might be a good choice for you as it is both functional and stylish.
The place where this product is sold is an online marketplace. An online marketplace is where you can buy and sell a variety of products, whether it’s big-ticket items like cars or small-ticket items like clothing and accessories. Your product will be plugged into a variety of marketing channels — including SEO, paid social media, and display advertising — to drive traffic to your place. So, in this case, the SEO will help drive traffic to the hoodie and sweatshirt marketplace, while the paid social media will help you engage with potential customers on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
Now, let’s look at how we can promote this product.
Product
The product area of the plan is where you’ll enter all of the relevant information about the product that you’re promoting. Start by defining the product and establishing its value. Next, describe the features of your product and how it differs from other products that are currently available on the market. In the next step, establish the pricing for your product. Moreover, you should consider establishing a minimum purchase amount so that you can easily convert potential customers into buyers. In the following step, establish the targets for your product. Here you can include the number of units that you hope to sell in a month, as well as the earnings that you expect to generate from the product. All of these elements will help you figure out how many copies you need to manufacture.