Guide to Making an Online Marketing Plan to Explode Your Startup

Although a bit tricky, writing a comprehensive online marketing plan can help you direct your company’s daily activities, easily measure its success or failure, differentiate your approach and enable you to receive the most from what’s available.

Having a developed online marketing plan will jump up your startup to incredible heights. If all of this left you a bit scared, relax – it is actually simpler than it seems. Writing a high-quality online marketing plan isn’t a complex and time-consuming process.

To make this easier for you, I’ve written in this blog post a simple guide for making an online marketing plan.

Step one – Go for High-Value Customers (HVC)

This is probably a new thing for you, but the big chunk of your customers has a minuscule impact on your startup profit. Those people are also the ones who will probably go purchase elsewhere is something cheaper or better comes along.

With this in mind, creating a marketing plan with the intention of attracting more of these “Hm” customers will be a failure for your company. These consumers come with high attrition rate and low long-term profits. As a matter of fact, they will more likely drag your startup down.

That also applies to your website visitors. The goal is to convert some of these visitors into a high-value customer who will create profits for your company. Draw loyal customers, those who will remain loyal for a long time and drive your business  recurring profits.

If the visitors of your website aren’t the targeted audience for which the website was built, their traffic will have little value. There will only be low traction and big bounce rates. Although some visitors will surely convert, those won’t be your best consumers.

Vice versa, if you have the understanding and knowledge for your target audience and market, you can make an online marketing plan uniquely suited just for them. Also, it will be easier to pre-qualify potential customers by focusing solely on the ideal customer type, the one with the most value for your business.

Step two – Blogging, an Engine for Traffic and Lead Generation

Original, actionable and high-quality content can be the fuel for your online marketing plan. And blogging is the best path for consistently creating high-quality content. Content marketing receives three times more leads than paid search advertising.

Blogs generate more inbound links, more indexed pages, and this results in more organic traffic and higher search engine ranking. Blogs consist of several different parts, and combining them properly creates high-quality content.

First, you need a well-researched topic. Identify those topics that perform excellently in your niche. Find loopholes in the best posts and then create an even better piece of content on the same topic.

Secondly, have a great headline – since goods headlines have an almost 80% impact on the rate of opening. Thirdly, use great image content.

And lastly, use data evidence to back up your claims. Solid data references make content credible and verifiable for its readers. The better the quality of the content, the more it will generate qualified leads and attract organic traffic.

Step three – Use Social Media Platforms

There are over 2 billion Facebook users, 1 billion Instagram users, and almost 2 billion YouTube users. Why not use this to your advantage and create a presence on different social media? You can use social media as a natural way to share your brands content and increase brands awareness and exposure.

Create accounts on Instagram or Facebook and share interesting material daily. That can be either picture, some interesting facts, and videos about your service or product, etc. In order to attract followers, remember to update your content consistently.

For instance, take pictures with your phone that show what you do, what your company does and how things are happening in the workplace. You can then share these pictures in a number of ways. One of those ways is Airdrop, for example, and here is a simple way to get to know how to use Airdrop in case you’re still not familiar with it. Shortly, it is an iPhone feature that allows you to beam photos and albums from your device to other devices directly, either through a wireless network or Bluetooth connection. It is much simpler to share photos with such a feature than texting and emailing photos in batches – a cumbersome process that is also timely.

Great pictures increase engagement and are much better for attracting customers attention than plain old text format.

Use Google+ only for an SEO reason, since it won’t gain as much interaction as other social media. Create on Google+ a detailed profile that links to your other social profiles to help them rank better in the relevant search results.

On Twitter, search for hashtags in your industry niche and reach to users in this fashion. Compliment others about their blog that they wrote. Ask questions related to your hashtag. The end result will be more organic followers and interactions from a core group of followers.

But trying to have followers on just about every social media isn’t only money demanding, but also a loss of time. If you’ve already identified your high-value customers, you know precisely on what social networks that target audience can be found – engage them here only.

Probe each social media and see how things are going. For instance, you might notice that your audience on Instagram is regularly engaging with you, while there is no much response on Twitter. In this case, automate your Tweets and focus solely on Instagram.

Step four – Analyze the Results

The ROI on google ads is twice the amount invested, while for email marketing every dollar you use returns almost $40.  This may not apply to your own marketing endeavors. You will need to analyze them separately and leave only those that bring higher ROI.

Run a few tests in your marketing plan. These will give you an understanding of what was efficient and what wasn’t and show on which marketing tactics you need to focus your marketing capital on. Test the waters and select those tactics that are efficient.

There will be mistakes along the way. You won’t be able to evade them, but you can prepare for them and learn from them. Pour your resources toward effective revenue-creating marketing strategies and avoid those with low return on investment. Separate your marketing activities into campaigns.

You can track your marketing campaigns with Google Analytics to track their efficiency in real time. Schedule your time and track your KPIs regularly. Ultimately evaluate your ROI on different marketing campaigns and repeat those that were successful.

That’s it. Hopefully, this blog post helped you understand how to better use your online marketing plan to explode your startup to new heights. Apply other marketing growth strategies in your startup plan and your business will succeed in the years to come.