Here is the key to effective online marketing plan development, and really, Internet marketing for Small Business. Now that the curtains have fallen on 2010, and we are just upon the end of Q1 of 2011, it's time to take a good hard look at our key decisions and consequences of those decisions taken in 2010 and through Q1 thus far. To plan an effective strategy for the rest of 2011, let's first do a simple exercise; let's list out the key marketing decisions or social media marketing strategy you had implemented in 2010. Let's list these out on the left side of the paper and on the right, we'll list out the results of those decisions. Let's also add one more column and give each decision a rating on the scale of say 1 to 5. For the best decision draw five cute little red stars and so on and the worst will obviously have no or 1 star. Let's call these "success stars" or "success rating". At the bottom of the paper, write down the total amount that was spent on all the marketing effort in 2010. If the actual spend was less than the budgeted amount, write down the budgeted figure.
At the end of this exercise, you and anyone else looking at your chart should be in a good position to easily pick out the best marketing decisions and identify the worst marketing decisions made in 2010. Having picked out the best of 2010, identify the budget that was allotted to each and consider increasing those budgets starting with 25%. While performing this exercise, take a look at all the decisions that received less than 5 success stars. Within each of these past internet business consulting strategies, could you identify key decisions that might have led to less than spectacular performance? If you could do that then you probably could 'rewire' that marketing strategy for 2011. For all such "rewired" marketing decisions award stars on the scale of 1 to 5. Five stars if you are very confident the new plan will work and less than 5 if you are not so confident. Let's call these "confidence stars". Again, hike the budget for 5-stared "rewired" strategies by 15% and the rest on a diminishing scale. Drop all "rewired" marketing decisions that have received less than 3 "confidence stars".
To the above chart, add any new marketing strategies that were planned for 2011. Once, you've done that, what you now see would be the rough marketing plan for 2011. How are you doing so far in Q1? Need to make more changes to your online marketing plan?
Next, you need to take a good hard look at what your competitors did in 2010. Did they appear successful? Try and identify successful marketing strategies adopted by your competitors and use your experience to allocate a budget. If you have not already adopted your competitors best marketing strategies into your own online business marketing plan for 2011, do so now. If you were too busy running your own company to pay attention to what your competitors were doing and therefore have no idea of your competitors marketing strategies then my friend, you would probably want to take a good hard look at how you do business.
If your business is online, take a look at the annual State of Search Engine Marketing report released by SEMPO. This report documents projected search marketing trends and will give you valuable insight on what your competitors may have been doing in 2010.
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