Building a Complete Internet Marketing Plan for 2020 and Beyond
The world of internet marketing is always advancing and changing. Platforms update their services, people change their online habits, niches grow, and new trends emerge all the time.
That is why you need to develop a plan that is flexible enough to help you adapt to these changes without you having to go back to the drawing board.
In this chapter, I’m going to show you the steps you’ll need to take to develop a complete internet marketing plan that’ll work in 2020 and beyond!
Step 1 - Define Your Audience and Its Needs
The first step you must take is to learn more about your audience. Knowing your customer avatar well is what’ll let you target the type of internet user that is most likely to become a lead, then a customer for your business.
The first thing you must do is find out where your audience hangs out.
Start by doing a keyword research on Google using niche keywords, product keywords, and search terms. Then take note of the top places in search results. It might be forums, blogs, or eCommerce sites.
Then do the same keyword research on social media. You can do this keyword research on all social media platforms you want.
Now that you’ve found where your audience tends to go online, start monitoring their conversations. Focus on their sentiments, their pain points, and their opinions about the products or services that you offer.
In other words, find out what your audience wants from your niche market so you can offer the perfect solution.
Lastly, you must create a buyer persona or customer avatar. A buyer persona is the profile of your ideal customer.
To build a customer avatar, you need to find the average age of the people in your audience, the dominant gender in your audience, their buying habits, their online activities, their average level of education, their demographics and locations, what brands they discuss, and what other products, services, and niches they’re interested in.
Building a buyer persona will help you to better target organic traffic with focused content. You’ll also be able to create ads with the perfect focused message as well as to define audience targeting when running paid advertising campaigns.
Step 2 – Segment Your Audience
Once you’ve defined your audience, you’ll find that there are different types of people in it. You must add each one of these groups of people to a segment.
All you must do is to create audience segment lists. Most marketing and advertising channels allow you to create and save audience segments, and you can also save them to a spreadsheet.
Step 3 – Develop A Conversion Funnel
You must develop a conversion funnel if you want to drive conversions more effectively. With a conversion funnel you can plan how you’ll drive a visitor to your content pages, from your content pages to your mailing list, and from your mailing list to your sales pages.
To create a conversion funnel, you must define at what point the customer journey starts. For instance, your customer journey could start on your blog, when a potential customer is searching for information about products related to those you offer.
It could also begin on your Facebook business page or your LinkedIn business page. You get the point.
Next you must define the consideration stage.
This is the point where the customer starts considering your products and offers. At this stage, your potential customer might start engaging more with your brand across your channels.
Next you must focus on the desire stage.
In this stage, your potential customer actively likes your products, yet hasn’t made a purchasing decision. He or she might need to further compare the quality, price, or other attributes of your products to other options. in this stage, you must try to capture your potential customer by offering them deep discounts, free trials, or samples.
The next stage is the action stage.
Here your potential customer made the decision to buy from you, and your job is simply to make the buying process as seamless as possible.
The last stage is the nurturing stage.
If the customer liked your product, then he can become a repeat customer. in this stage, your job is to nurture your customer with perks, gifts, promotions, and exclusive offers.
Once you know your customers’ journey, you can create flows using your funnel tools such as Converdy (the one I use).
Step 4 – Implement a Smart Content Marketing Strategy
If you’re already using content marketing, it might be time to implement some optimizations to achieve a smarter content marketing strategy. Whether it’s video, articles, or visual discovery, some elements that you must implement to enhance your content are:
Appeal to human emotions to make your content more relatable and engaging.
Use humor, drama, and nostalgia to hit your audience’s core emotions.
Optimize all your content for search by using the right choice of keywords.
Optimize all your content for all types of devices and operating systems.
Consider optimizing for mobile first as more people now search on mobile devices than on home or laptop computers.
Step 5 – Develop A Cross- Platform Flow
Make no mistake, all your content should be released on all your marketing channels, but you must do it intelligently. If you only post the same message across all your channels, then it won’t work.
What you must do is optimize your message for each channel and link your content from one channel to another.
For example, you can tease a piece of content with a brief message using a single image on Twitter. Add a link to the full story on Instagram, where you’ll add a longer piece of content. Include a more captivating image inviting users to follow the link in the bio, where you can direct them to a complimentary content piece on your website!
Step 6 – Refine Your Email Lists
Pay attention to those email subscribers that are opening and interacting with your emails.
Add them to a new list and send them emails with more offers and actionable elements.
Step 7 – Audit and Optimize
Establish a complete internet marketing calendar where you define a date to audit your campaigns.
Check, test, and benchmark your results on this date and make modifications on areas where improvements are needed.
For example, if one of your articles is getting low bounce rates from social media traffic but a low number of visits from search, it might mean that you need to modify the article headline and metadata.