subject: 4 Factors Needed To Develop Your Websites Marketing Plan [print this page] Marketing plans are the blueprints allowing you to drive your business and develop a list of resources needed to accomplish your goals. Online businesses are no different than physical stores in this respect. This article presents four factors that will help you to develop an effective marketing plan and determine the resources needed to send customers to your digital store.
1. Be focused. Determine your objectives and establish goals designed to reach them. The keywords you build your website on should have enough volume to drive sufficient sales based on a realistic sale to presentation ratio. If one out of one hundred visitors actually buy, you can determine the level of promotion needed to advertise your website and drive the needed traffic to reach your targeted sales goals.
2. Develop a marketing budget. You can use a wide variety of techniques to drive traffic to your website; articles, PPC, forums, list exchanges, etc. Some methods can be costly while others, writing and submitting your own articles for example, can even be free. Once you can quantify your goals you can determine the methods you will use to accomplish them and you can develop a budget based on your available resources of time and money.
3.Buy and use the right tools for the job. This is an investment in the success of your business. More people will browse what you have to offer than buy what you are promoting. Capturing leads and following up with your prospects is the lifeblood of your business. For that reason it is necessary to have an automated email response and follow up mechanism, or auto-responder, that will capture your prospects email addresses and present them with targeted messages on a regular basis. Use all the tools you need to make traffic generation effective.
4.Develop both long term and short term strategies. Pay per click (PPC) can be the fastest means of driving traffic because it brings immediate results. Although PPC is one method of quickly driving targeted traffic to your website you will need a strategy that will generate traffic and leads on a long term basis. PPC, as most methods used for quick results can be, is also one of the most expensive ways to advertise your business. More affordable methods of driving traffic to your website on a long term basis include article marketing, blogging and forum participation.
These four factors will help you to develop an effective marketing plan and efficiently promote your website. Following these steps will help you use your resources of time and money to select the best marketing tools in promoting your website.
