Important Components To Include

A Marketing Plan is the first thing you need above everything else when you start your internet marketing business. Even if your business is brick-and-mortar and not solely based on the web, a marketing plan should be your number one priority.

It is pretty mind-boggling how many people get into business thinking that they don’t need a marketing plan. All businesses need a marketing plan.

One of the most common reasons people think they don’t need a marketing plan seems to be based on the product. Some people believe that their product is so good that people are just going to buy it without them having to do much at all. But they aren’t taking into account the fact that if people never find the product, no matter how good it is, they aren’t going to sell it.

If you don’t have a customer base, then you don’t have anyone to buy your products, and it is a mystery why so many businesses ignore this very simple fact. They plan out every other aspect of their business but forget about the marketing plan. They spend weeks designing the perfect website, months perfecting their products, and even concentrate on things like logos and business cards without sparing a thought for marketing and their marketing plan.

One of the reasons that businesses give for this is that they simply cannot afford to do any marketing. But the truth is, you can’t afford to do marketing and not have a marketing plan. There is sufficient evidence out there that marketing almost always gives you a higher return than any money or time that you invest in it.

Some businesses think that they can just figure it out later. But this is a mistake too because once you are ready to launch your product, you are losing money every day that you’re not making sales.

Search Engine Marketing – SEM

Search Engine Marketing, SEM, is a term that refers to paid marketing that you do to promote your website. Usually specifically with search engines like Google or Bing. In the past, this was simply a way to refer to all of the search engine optimization methods that you used, paid and unpaid, but it has become specialized and simply refers to pay-per-click campaigns and other types of search engine optimization that you pay for.

PPC Advertising – PPC Advertising, which stands for pay-per-click, is a business model that uses advertisements on a search engine results page to draw in customers. PPC works on a bidding system. The person who bid the highest for a particular keyword is listed as the top search result.
However, there is another form of advertising that you should be aware of because it uses the same initials as pay-per-click. It is known as per-per-call. It isn’t very popular yet, but it is based on the number of clicks that result in a call from a smartphone. These are used in mobile advertising and this may be more popular later.

CPM – Another form of search engine marketing is CPM, which stands for cost-åer-thousand impressions. An impression is whenever a computer screen displays your ad. Banner ads, sidebar ads, and any CPM type of advertisement are based on 1000 impressions. You will set up your ad in advance, determining how many times you want that ad to be displayed (in multiples of 1000), and then launch. The downside of this form of advertising is that you pay whether or not you get a single click.

Search engine marketing is going to become much more popular in the future as the web space becomes more and more crowded and larger numbers of advertisers fight for the limited amount of space that is available. However, if you use SEM combined with your regular SEO efforts, you will probably be very successful. You just want to make sure that you have created the right advertisement, no matter if you are using PPC ads or CPM ads, visual or text. You need to make that ad compelling and irresistible if you want it to be as effective as possible and worth the cost.

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Optimize For Local Search

No matter what kind of business you are in, you need to optimize for local search. Local search is one of the last great untapped resources of search engine marketing and optimization and if you can ensure that you are leading on the local search you are going to end up with a huge audience.

So, how do you do that? There are several things that you can do to optimize your business for local SEO.

1. Claim Your Business Listing – You would be surprised how many businesses fail to complete this one, very simple step. If you want Google to list you locally, you need to let them know that you are there. Make sure that you are claiming your business listing for each of your locations.
2. Be Consistent – Having the same business name, address, and phone number across the entire internet will be much more effective and inspire trust, plus, the local SEO bots will not get confused by conflicting information and categorize you incorrectly.
3. Choose The Right Category – Most businesses will easily fit into a single category, but some will need more than one. You want to make sure that you know what categories you are listed in.
4. Use Citations – Citations are places around the web where you can list your business to prove to Google that the information is correct. Not only will this give you credibility with Google and consistency with customers, but it will also give your website an SEO boost if you are linking back to your website. Some of the citation websites that you can lose include the Better Business Bureau, the Chamber of Commerce in your local city or town, any associations that you are a member of, any industry groups that maintain directories, and pretty much anywhere else that you can think of.
5. Reviews And Testimonials – It goes without saying that we are talking about positive reviews here. Websites like Yelp, Angie List, Google Reviews, and other sites that are listed fairly high in the search engines can make a pretty significant impact on how your customers see you and whether they buy from you. Everyone uses reviews these days to make buying decisions.

The Essential Landing Page Checklist

Your landing page may be the most important element of your website. Where people land when they click on a link is their first impression of your business, and there are certain things that must be present on that page in order to guide them through the process of becoming a buyer and avoiding them immediately bouncing to the next site on the list.

Here is an essential landing page checklist:

1. User-Friendly Design – You want your website to be created so that it is as easy as possible for visitors to navigate, give them the information that they need, and make it as simple as you can without compromising the information that you need to share.
2. Immediate Value – Visitors who land on your site should be able to immediately see the value in what is being offered. If they do not see the value on your landing page, then they are not going to go any further to try to find some. They will just click the back button and move on.
3. A Clear Business Model – You want it to be immediately apparent to anyone who visits your site what your business model is. Having a confusing business model will not only confuse search engines but will also confuse your potential customers.
4. Real Testimonials – If you are selling a product or service and you put up fake testimonials, people are going to know right away. Not only will they all sound like they are written by the same person, but most website designers place them in such a way that they are obviously fake such as each one having a perfect, high-quality image of the customer with it. Real customers rarely send in photos of themselves.
5. Claims Supported By Facts and Research – If you are claiming that the supplement that you are promoting will cure acne forever, then you need to have some scientific basis for making that claim, not to mention a great deal of research cited. If customers find out you aren’t telling them the truth about one thing, they won’t trust anything you say.
6. Contact Information – Customers do not trust businesses that do not have contact information listed. It is not enough to have an email or contact form. You need to have your physical address, phone number, and social profile listed on your website.

Implement Social Media In Your Marketing Plan

Social Media is one of the biggest parts of making money online, but also a marketing platform. Every website you visit for Internet Marketing advice will tell you to use social media. But even with all of that information out there, people are still using social media incorrectly.

Here are some of the best ways to use social media to make money on the internet and also for marketing your business.

1. Use ‘Look-Alike’ Ads – This is something that Facebook has started doing to make marketing more effective for their advertisers. Look-alike ads are ads that are specifically designed for a certain audience. These ads are matched with the perfect customer and designed so that customers will respond to them.
2. Use Instagram Stories – Instagram Stories are one of the most underused features of the platform. This is strange considering that it has grown to be one of the biggest social media sites of the modern age. Instagram is used by everyone because everyone takes pictures, but businesses that combine product images with the Instagram Stories feature to see a great deal more engagement and success.
3. Use The Ad Tools Offered By LinkedIn – This resume site has some pretty incredible advertising tools, not to mention lots of groups and ways to target specific audiences. The ad tools are something relatively new and just one more way that LinkedIn is trying to compete with some of the other social media networks out there. A couple of examples include the ability to collect leads from the LinkedIn news feed and the ability to use retargeted ads.
4. Use YouTube To Promote Gated Content – There are a lot of people that use YouTube every day, and uploading your videos is a smart idea no matter what. But one of the ways that you can best leverage YouTube is to use videos to draw in traffic for gated content on your main website. Because YouTube is part of Google, there are a lot of advertising policies that most people don’t even consider.
5. Use Facebook Groups – If you aren’t using Facebook Groups to promote your business, then you are missing out on a huge feature on the social media site. Facebook Groups are designed to build communities within Facebook and becoming a part of a community means that you have instant rapport and influence with the people within that group.

Wrapping Up

Now I hope that you can see why you need a marketing plan for your business and how important it is. A marketing plan ensures that you don’t forget any important marketing components. That you have carefully thought through how to market your business.

I’m more or less sure there are some elements in this article that you hadn’t thought of, or the very worst. You hadn’t thought about putting up a marketing plan before launching your business.

These were of course just a few things that you could implement in your marketing plan but if you start to implement these ideas in your marketing plan I’m pretty sure that you will succeed with your business.

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