COVERING YOUR MARKETING PLAN IN YOUR BUSINESS PLAN
Marketing is an important part of your online business success and as such, it is important that you make sure your business plan thoroughly details what your marketing plan looks like. Investors will look at this and the information will be helpful for them in making their decision, but as a business owner you will also use this information to help keep you on track and to later evaluate whether you were successful at achieving your marketing goals.
Your Marketing Plan
Your business operations will be centered around your marketing plans and the image you are striving to create. Your marketing will strive to create ‘branding’ for your company and it will focus on making you visible. Online this requires a different skill set than what would be used in a traditional business.
Your business will set standards to adhere to make your company appear credible to the consumer market to grow your business and ultimately your revenue. Let’s look at what your marketing plan needs to address.
#1 Market Analysis
You need to analyze your market before you ever open your doors since you need to know who you will be selling your products to. In addition, in almost every case, there are the same or similar products on the market and you need to analyze how you are going to grab your ‘market share.’
#2 Your Competition
You will need to determine who your competition is online. You will need to identify your five most direct competitors, how they advertise, what type of SEO work they have done on their sites, how they place in the search engines, what the strengths and weaknesses are, how their product is different, and how their image is different.
#3 Customer Profile
You will need to determine what your online customer profile looks like. Often you will have the same product but it targets a completely different market. For example, ‘Product A’ online might target an Asian market, it might target a small unique niche on a family site or it might target through email marketing. You need to identify who you are targeting as your market.
#4 Market Share
You will need to make projections that are realistic about your projected market share, and your projected sales. It’s important to not guess and to actually do your projections because investors and lenders are smart and they will simply turn away from your business plan and your proposal, and that would be a shame if you have a great idea that you want to launch and turn into your online business.