In order to survive in today’s constantly changing and very competitive marketplace it is crucial to have a practical your marketing plan which takes into account the importance of obtaining a measurable return on effort and money expended on any marketing activities.

Your strategic marketing plan is a document that clearly states why you are in business, what you have to offer customers, how to retain existing customers, how to price your products competitively and profitably and provides a plan of action to follow to retain and grow your existing customer base.

Here is an outline of a simple marketing plan:

1. Analysis of Your Current Situation

1.1. Know Your Customers

1.2. Know Your Offering

1.3. Know Your Competitors

1.4. Know Your Target Market

1.5. Know Your Partners

1.6. Know Your Company

1.7. Know Your Money

2. Marketing Strategy and Objectives

2.1. Setting Goals for Success

2.2. Creating Your Message

2.3. Creating Your Budget

2.4. Tracking Your Efforts

3. Marketing Tools

3.1. Advertising

3.2. Personal Contact

3.3. Public Relations

3.4. Online Marketing

3.5. Sales Process

If you want to easily create your full strategic marketing plan, using the information you have at hand, make sure it has all the parts as outlined above. If you need any help, make you that you contact a marketing consultant.

Many your website owners do not make it easy, clear and secure for people to contact them – if you want customers to contact you directly from your website, keep the process simple.

In general, over 60 percent of online shoppers abort the ordering process once they’ve entered the shopping cart. It’s a pity that after gaining their attention, interest and desire you can still lose them due to a complicated, unclear or unsafe contact form. To prevent this, try to follow the advice:

• Tell your visitors upfront about what they should do in order to get in touch with you.
• Make sure that your contact pages and forms are easy to understand. Test them with your customers or relatives even if they don’t browse the Internet very often.
• Make sure that your contact page shows an understandable notice if the customer forgets to enter the email address or any other required field.
• Make sure that your contact pages work in every geographical area you target. Some countries don’t have postal numbers or their regional structuring can be different from yours.
• It’s very important that your contact pages are secure.
• Test your contact pages regularly in order to make sure they work.
• Also make the contact form easier to fill in – in most cases, all you probably need will be name, phone, email, and the comment field – they don’t need to be mandatory.

After you implement the above steps, you might see that your online marketing has moved to the next level.

If you want your marketing strategy to prove effective, at the end of the year we need to check whether you stuck with the plan and how well you did with the individual campaigns.

Here is a clear description of what you should measure:

• Campaign Start – When did the campaign start?
• Expected # Leads – How many potential customers do you expect to contact you after the campaign?
• Actual # Leads – How many leads did you actually get so far?
• Expected # Sales – How many customers do you expect to buy from you after the campaign?
• Actual # Sales – How many sales did you actually get so far?
• Expected Sales Value – How much sales will the campaign generate?
• Actual Sales Value – How much sales did the campaign generate so far?
• Expected Budget – What is your budget for the campaign? How much will you spend?
• Actual Budget – How much did you spend so far on the campaign?
• Return on Investment – How much sales did $1 of actual budget generate?

If you manage to measure these indicators regularly, you’ll be able to soon evaluate your marketing strategy, even by comparing the results on a monthly basis.

One of the crucial aspects of your marketing is the right targeting – what type of customers will be most profitable for you to aim at?

Have you applied your familiarity and experience with the existing customers in choosing areas of the main focus for future?

• Identify new opportunities in the your market
• Know who to target and how to identify potential buyers
• Understand who are the strongest influencers within customers
• Have a basis for creating your success marketing strategy and realistic goals

This way you will be able to not only make sure you have the right marketing strategy in place, but actually that it’s all aligned with your target market’s needs.

Providing that your keywords fall below the 0.5% CTR for the first 1000 impressions, they might get disabled. That is the first reason you need to track your keywords performance and modify them regularly. Remember, change your words around, use new keyword matching options, try out different capitalisation and spelling variations, use singular or plural versions as well as different punctuation and grammar tenses…

You can decide if you want to receive daily, weekly or monthly Google Adwords reports.

With Google Adwords, you can also create your personalised reports in only a few minutes. Click on the tab “Report“ => “Create a report now”. You can create a report to track the performance of your keywords, text ad, image ad, URL, ad group, campaign or the whole account.

In order to save money, you can delete keywords from your list which do not convert into sales. It is also recommended that you “peel” those keywords that get low CTR and “stick” them to a new campaign or ad group with an ad specifically targeting them.

Making tiny changes to your ad can have a strong impact on your CTR. Keep changing your ads around regularly. After a few weeks, you will be able to detect your best performing keywords. Your ad should include these keywords. In the same way, if you detect any under performing keywords, delete them from your ad.

Google also has a built-in “conversion tracking” tool that’s linked to AdWords.  You put their code in the “success” page on your website and along with your CTR statistics, Google will then show you the percentage of visitors who opt in or buy in your weekly, monthly or daily report, or contact you, or take any action you set as a conversion.

This is the crucial point of tracking your Google Adwords performance. Since conversions are what you are aiming for, you should always check that their number and value is growing from week to week.

When you know the purpose of your website, you should give your visitors a REASON to move towards the goal. Remember, it is not your goal that they will follow; in fact, people are always looking for what is in it for THEM.

Below follows a list of the vital elements of successful website content.

1. Benefits

To give customers what they are looking for, always list benefits (see Chapter 2) of your products rather than features.

Nobody cares so much about what procedures you used when creating your internal services manuals, or for how many years you’ve been around. Usually, what matters to them is what problems you can solve, and more importantly, how they will benefit from using your product.

In addition, websites offering services that managed to fix a problem usually get highest conversion rates.

It is also essential to make sure that your you:we ratio is high enough, which means that you use the word YOU more than WE, speaking about your customers, not yourself.

Remember again: customers don’t care about you at all. The only thing they are looking for is what is in it for them.

2. Call to Action

Once you have decided what you want your visitors to do and after revealing all the benefits they can get, it is crucial to tell them what to do next. It must be crystal clear what they need to do:

- Click here to contact us now!

- Sign up for the Free Newsletter with your Tips Here.

- Press Enter to continue. Etc.

In order to make a call to action more catchy and attention gaining, there is one smart trick: use the red colour every time you want to highlight something so that people will click on it. However, do not overdo it, since when your website is red on its whole, the particular spots will not stand out.

3. Testimonials

Add testimonials to your Testimonials page, and spread them over all the pages in an appropriate structure.

Be as specific as possible and make sure you use relevant testimonials on pages where you speak about individual services.

Always get the customer to allow you to use their testimonial in your marketing materials. For more on testimonials, read Chapter 12.

4. Privacy Policy

As soon as you collect any data from your visitors, you should create a privacy policy (you can use this free privacy policy generator or any other you find on the Internet). Add your privacy policy to the bottom of your pages.

5. The Best Website Structure & Navigation

There is nothing worse than arriving at a website and having difficulty to understand where to go for the information you are seeking. Have an easy to use, clearly marked navigation so that your visitors click-through instead of click-away in frustration:

- All your web pages should be no more than 3 clicks away from the home page.

- On every page you should link back to your home page and your main service(s).

- Make your logo at the top of every page clickable and going to home page.

- Structure your menu on the top in a way that will be clearer and more effective.

- Make it easy to contact you from any page.

You can use this structure or come up with your own – whatever you feel will work best for your customers and prospects.

6. Motivate customers to Come Back Again with Fresh Content

To attract your first time visitors to come back and to keep coming back, you must always have what to offer: nobody will keep returning to see the same pages all the time.

We all know that the more involved customers become with you, the relationship matures and builds: this could be done using an online discussion forum, blog, or just a simple option to post a comment. More on this towards the end of this part.

7. Attractive Design

They say, a picture is worth a thousand words. However, it is actually words that sell. This means that you should use a good mix of both – pictures with highly relevant and interesting content.

8. No Distractions: Keeps Your Visitors Focused

In order to keep your visitors focused on the steps you want them to take, keep all unnecessary distractions away.

If you are paying to bring your visitors to a particular page, so called “landing page” (because they “land” on that particular page from their search in Google), make sure this page is not stuffed with links that will direct them away from the page.

The only links your landing page should contain are those in line with your goal: links to your enquiry pages, newsletter sign up forms, etc.

Are you aware of the potential your company has in your market?

Do you want to improve your company’s efficiency with business coaching?

Do you need to ensure your business growth?

Do you sometimes have the impression that your business remains stabgnant?

It is very important how your your company is structured, especially if you have grown to more than 20 employees.

When you now look at your chart, can you identify which departments could possibly struggle with communication among each other?

Also, it is important to note that sales and marketing should work closely with customer service department, since they need to pass feedback from each other.

The crucial step of online marketing is setting a goal you want to achieve. What is it that you want your visitors to do? This could be one of the following:

• Fill in a contact us form
• Fill in an enquiry form
• Register for a free consultation/appointment
• Sign up for a newsletter with free your tips
• Download a free ebook with your advice
• Read articles for/about customers
• Take a survey
• Participate in a competition etc.

Ideally you will be able to put a value on each of your goals – i.e. how much is each step worth to your business? By stating this, you will be able to see clearly where your focus should be and how to work most effectively.

While many online marketing handbooks would start with telling you how to drive lots of visitors to your website, we chose a different approach. There is no point in driving millions of visitors to your web pages, when nobody will do what you would like them to do – either contact you, or sign up for your newsletter or do anything else you want them to do.

Therefore we think the first step is to focus on optimising your website for customers, with relevant website content writing, and then you can look at how you can use search engines like Google, to bring more visitors to the website.

Does your website work as a 24/7 sales tool, bringing in sales leads even when you sleep? Or are you having a problem with your website?

Why are you not getting more visitors that contact you or buy from you?

Could you use search engine optimisation, Google Adwords and powerful website content to get more online visitors, more online leads and more online sales?

How about focusing on the following 4 areas right now:

• Learn what you can improve on your website, so that more of your visitors will actually contact you
• Find out about the magic of search engine optimisation and how to have your website ranked in Google
• Understand the power of online newsletters and blogs and know how to setup your own ones fast
• Discover the secret of using online social networking websites for your business