Strategic Internet Marketing - Tips For Planning An Advertising Campaign?

by Paul Anstis

Strategic Internet Marketing, like standard strategic planning, is about the direction you plan to head in. It is a combination of where you want to go (goal) and how you want to get there.

With marketing your goal is the sale of a product at a reasonable profit, but there are several directions you can follow to achieve it, to come up with a good strategic internet marketing plan there are three basic questions you should ask yourself -

1) What am I marketing
2) Who are the customers
3) How am I going to market it

I will go through each of these in turn to elaborate

1) What Am I Marketing

In this article I am going to assume you will be marketing a product or service that already exists and that you had no part in creating.
You need to look at all the relevant details of the product , including its features and more importantly, what benefits can it provide the customer . It is also important to get an insight into what makes the product unique, how is it different from its competitors.

2) Who Are My Customers

Determine not only who would use the product but also who would purchase it. Depending on your budget you can use market research with thigs like surveys to gather statistics or you can simply do research online looking at related blogs, forums and chat rooms to determine who is using similar products . It is at this stage that you should begin to identify different niches to allow your marketing to be more focused.

3) How Am I Going To Market It

Depending on your budget you will have to decide if you want to use paid marketing methods, free methods, or a mix of the two. If you are looking to use paid methods you have options such as pay-per-click using the search engines, banner advertising and email advertising to name a few. Basically paid marketing methods are anything where you have to use money to direct traffic to your website. It also includes outsourcing free marketing methods.
Free marketing methods are methods such as article and video marketing, blogging, using social networking, forums, free online classifieds etc.
I will not go into the details of all of these, suffice to say that for for looking at strategic internet marketing you should have a good idea of what method you will use and also how to measure their effectiveness.

If you do not have a good strategic internet marketing plan it is very easy to lose your way and not market effectively or efficiently.

About the Author:

It is important to understand that this outline refered to a plan for marketing a product which is different than your marketing business, for that you need a full strategic plan.

For more tips on setting up a small business online, and a huge amount of information and training about internet marketing, visit Paul at his blog or his website http://biztrainonline.com