How to Develop a Marketing Plan for Online Business: 4 Tips to Market Your Business Online

Every year businesses fail or lose revenue because they neglect to create a marketing plan for online business. Whether you are a typical brick and mortar company, a small business owner, a network marketer or a work from home mom, establishing a marketing plan for online business is crucial in today’s competitive markets.4 Tips for Creating a Marketing Plan for Online Business1. Determine your Ideal Potential Client: It’s important to perform market research to pin down who your perfect customer is. Think about their age, income, geographic region, and without a doubt their needs. Determining the type of customer you want to reach will help you assess the optimum and most efficient ways to market your business online to reach them.2. Think of Promotion Ideas: Consider the ways that you could boost your online business simplifying it into short-term and long term strategies. Those strategies can be further defined by your budget; can you build traffic quickly utilizing paid marketing methods or are you going to have to’ work for your traffic’ using slower lower cost marketing methods. Let’s define those campaigns as:Short-Term – PPC, Facebook ads, search engine optimization and marketing,Long-Term – Social media engagement, article and video marketing, list building, local search optimizationPaid Traffic – PPC, Facebook ads, offline print marketingFree / Low Cost – Social media engagement, online classifieds, Forum engagement, blogging, local search optimization3. Consistent Branding: Marketing online is no longer about having a good-looking website, it’s about being consistent with your business personality. It is worth investing time and resources to ensure that your identity is recognisable whether the customer is on your Facebook page, you tube channel, Twitter page, website or reading an article you have on ezines. Consistent branding helps identify you as a consistent expert in your online business.4. Work out your Budget: To be consistent in creating and following a marketing plan for online business it is important to set an annual and monthly budget. Research the costs involved in advertising and marketing your businesses in line with the promotion ideas you decided on. The online world has many tools and services that you may feel you need but that can quickly eat through your finances if not budgeted for up front. Consider adding in an emergency buffer for such events.It is important to periodically look back and reassess your marketing efforts, on a monthly or quarterly basis to ensure that the methods you are using are working to your best advantage. Remember that even using short-term and paid traffic methods it can still take 60 to 90 days to drive significant traffic to your website.