How to Set Goals and Online Marketing Plan?

All What You Need to Know About
Online Marketing:

Online Marketing

Online marketing is a highly significant way that enables business owners to be the leaders in their field. Using the online marketing helps them to display their trademarks and publicize their product line, values and kind. Because there are billion active users who use the internet daily, internet becomes the chance of lifetime to attract their interest and care towards the products they need.

Just when online marketing is done properly and strategically, it might be the major arbiter that differs between the company that aims to go forward and the company that will still as it is; using the old marketing methods. Aside from the fact that internet is a method of promoting the sales, the companies that spend money for the marketing, prove that they seek to improve their performance and provide better service for their customers by using the technology and the better modern strategies. But how do these companies set their goals and online marketing plan? Let’s see in this article

Setting The Goals and The Online Marketing Plan

What are your goals?

Setting the goals helps you mainly to draft your best online marketing way according to your business model. Setting the proper goals may be the most difficult and complicated process in this stage, but also, it’s the most important one as it enables you to know what you have to do, what you have to avoid, and what you have to focus on, as well as it will help you to determine the effectiveness of your business. The bottom line is that these goals is the only thing that will help you measuring the success of any effort exerted by you or by your team.

It’s likely to group your online marketing goals by scheduling them, like setting annual goals, quarterly goals, monthly goals, or even daily goals. However, it’s necessary for these goals to be specific, realistic, measurable and time-bound goals.

If you are looking forward to reaching your goals, be sure to write down the goals’ details just for more clarity. Set the goals with specific figures just like the following example:

Company: X

Year: 2019

Goal: %6 increasing in the sales each month

Then comes the grouping stage. If we used the same example above, it will be as follows: Attracting more visitors to your website and getting more visitors to be potential customers or getting more potential customers to be real customers.

Identify the time you need to achieve your goal and don’t forget to set a specific date for your task to adhere to the time. For example, you will work to achieve your goals within three months and you will start at the very beginning of the next month. Remember that there is another important step in this stage which is to be fully aware of the obstacles you will face and to find ways to solve them.

The following are some examples of the marketing goals that you may need to work on more to achieve it

Being well-known and reaching out to the public
Building your business reputation and your trademark.
Drafting your mailing list.
Having public for your blogger
Building brand awareness
Increasing sales
Servicing the customers

What is your plan?

If you don’t set the right plan that will encourage you to achieve your goal and will help you moving your business forward, your goals will still just written goals on papers. You may include the marketing plan within your general business plan, but the online marketing plan is: a document that explains all what you have to know to promote your business online successfully. Here are some points to help you setting a solid plan:

To know everything about your business

You might have done this step before while setting your general business plan, so this is easy for you. The more you know about your business, the easier you can set proper marketing plans. It’s necessary to know the internal and external environment, the type of the company and its values and culture, what are the products that this company sells and doesn’t sell, what are the customers’ types and trends, and the expected cost increase in case you face unexpected changes or cost increase as well as you have to know the reasons.

You can also do SWOT analysis to identify the internal strengths and weakness of your business, as well as its external opportunities and threats.

To be fully aware of the target market

The term “Target market” is frequently used as what may be more necessary than being aware of the environment where you will fight to have consumers? Being aware of the market is a main action to be able to set efficient and successful strategies. In the face of stiff competition, having a target market that is selected properly is more important than ever before, as no one can target the whole markets!

In this stage, you should write down everything you know about your perfect potential customers, including the main demographic information like: the age, geographical location, gender, educational level, income level, marital status, lifestyle…etc. You should also go deeper into their behaviors and decisions; i.e. why they buy from you? What is the problem you solve for them? How do they spend their free time? What are the sources they seek to gain the information?

Check your competitors

A very important step to be fully aware of what happens in the market is to try to analyze the current and the potential competition. You may need two ways to understand the competition; first one is watching the market from the customer’s view and gathering the whole information about the way your competitors talk and deal with the customers with. Second one is watching and understanding the competitors according to their different competitive strategies; how they plan and achieve their plans? What are their motivators? What are their strengths and weakness? What are their strategies? All this will provide you with a clear vision of the working way.

Set your online marketing budget

Setting budget requires more time, but once you finish, you will be aware of every cent you spent in the marketing process. Although Online marketing costs less than the usual marketing, setting the marketing budget is very important. So that, you should set the amount you intend to spend for marketing and promoting during a specific period; three months, six months, next year or so, and don’t forget the tactics that you can afford.

Many companies set their marketing plan based on what they had spent the last year and the amount they intend to spend for marketing in the current year. Actually, this is a perfect way to know how much did you achieve of your sales targets and to avoid exerting a lot of useless efforts.

Online marketing channels you will use

Your online marketing plan will include list of marketing channels that will help you to contact your customers over the internet and will publish the informative content that will help you getting potential customers and raise awareness of your trademark. Here are some ideas of marketing channels you can use: