Building A Website Marketing Plan
Once you’ve invested and built a website, do you have a plan to keep it fresh? To continue its development to the company’s goals?
A website marketing plan is your roadmap to long-term success. It’s a highly detailed, well-researched document that sets goals, provides directions, and defines the website’s strategy over time.
A Website Marketing Plan should dovetail into a company’s overall marketing plan. Online marketing is most effective when it operates in concert with offline marketing. Voice, look & feel,and message should be consistent across all media.
As part of the whole, the Website Marketing Plan has a narrower focus. It is concerned with developing strategies and tactics related to 3 major objectives:
- Define and Meet Company Goals for the Website.
The website is a tool that can answer any number of needs. These need to be distinctly called out. For example, the website should provide currentinformation on products and services to existing clients.It should provide the arena for sweepstakes or raffles in partnership with overall brand advertising campaigns. Perhaps it should also be a point of sale for certain items. Or it should generate sales leads, build demographic information on customers, etc. - Identify Website Marketing Strategies.
This breaks down into two ways. The first is in promotion of the site to the Internet at large. How will the website’s existence and advantages be communicated to customers? This should include details about Pay Per Click (PPC) and SEO strategies and other marketing avenues. What are the traffic goals? Desired click-through rates? The second overall strategy to be addressed is the internal one; what will be done on the site itself to keep it attractive to potential visitors? This can include things like blogs, animations, and viral flash games. Tactics for keeping a website fresh will include drilling down on technical details. - Budget.
Setting a budget for marketing your website should be more than the “big picture” number. It should tie each line-item to a schedule, a responsibility matrix, an anticipated benefit, and perhaps most importantly, the plan to generate the funds for the associated costs. Although the technology of online marketing can make it seem more complicated when talking about puts and takes, it still needs a balanced and detailed budget that weights costs against benefits.
Although it takes research and time to build a strong website marketing plan, the benefit is a blueprint to online success.
