Finalizing A Marketing Plan Blueprint

Conversion Is King

As was discussed in the last article the biggest objective of any business (and quite obviously) is conversion. Your marketing plans need to have the end goal of obtaining and increasing sales.

There are many ingredients which go into the overall strategies and tactics which make up your plan, but the end game is conversion of prospects and leads into sales. Therefore anything which increases your ability to sell is a converter, but the type of increase we are dealing with is anything which improves the base model blueprint conversion percentages after it is up and functioning.

These four power sales boosters are (CAES):

• Ad Copy
• Web Analytics
• Email Promotion
• Market Surveys

Strangely enough this site is a market blueprint for Internet marketing as it exists as a market online and it is also a blueprint plan for how to build your business step by step. It is only an architectural skeleton of processes and can have broader marketing planning constructs added to it.

Once you have a map of your market as we now have for the internet marketing world, but BEFORE you begin the whole build out of your website, you will need to create a…

Clear Plan (MCRA) – This should be a statement of exactly what needs to be done and must be:

• Measured – The predicted outcome of each task should be measurable and its performance monitored.
• Concentrated – Do not try to achieve more tasks than can be realistically achieved. The 80:20 Rule applies which will be explained in detail later.
• Realistic – It should be reachable given your investment and expertise.
• Agreed – Whoever is going to be building your plan should have the intension to follow it and agree that it is reachable.

We will be providing a more complete marketing template very soon which will be available for people serious about planning out their business. We will also be launching software with a complete marketing planning system for your business. You can use this plan software as a living document which will guide your campaigns taking place over the time frame of your plan.

Getting back to our monetization marketing plan (CAES) Ad Copy is our first real monetizing factor. Yes Ad Copy needs to be thought out and planned before you put your site up, but we are discussing the value of tweaking it once you have a solid site built.

You won’t just be tweaking your site’s ad copy but you will also be running multiple versions of your sales page and all ads you have out doing your promotion. One example is pay per click advertising. You will test various versions of your ad copy to see which one performs the best which then becomes what is known as your control.

A control is an ad version which is getting the highest amount of sales and once you have it you will always want to test new versions to try and beat it. The pen really is mightier than the sword and ad copy can be the major force which propels your business to profitability.

Web Analytics includes tracking and testing all of your advertising efforts. It is widely misunderstood and even more widely misused by people who think all analytic methods are similar. Market analytics includes methods like split testing and multi-variant testing which are two words that get thrown around improperly.

I will be presenting a web analytic solution later on which I have personally been involved in the development of and am very proud of this ground breaking technology. It literally is a new technology and trumps all other analytic software systems on the market.

There are problems with web analytics software. People don’t know how to use analytics properly or don’t use them regularly. Marketers don’t understand what the data means and more importantly don’t know how to apply that data towards making the right changes to their website. You will learn how to use these systems in a way that leads to more conversions as we progress with the site.

Email Promotion is your next big tool in the king’s arsenal which will increase conversions. It has been said a thousand times now that people won’t buy on first contact with a product or service. Whether it takes one contact or seven, email marketing is a major force in converting your prospects to buyers.

The idea of using email promotion and an auto responder to manage your efforts is a very bland idea to some. If you are bored by the idea or think email is less effective now than it used to be then you would be entirely wrong. Recent studies have shown email marketing is more effective than ever. In 2006, for example, Marketing Sherpa compiled a survey of 3637 responses from email marketers and employees at agencies working with email and the results were clear.

Simply put, nothing has replaced email as a channel yet and won’t anytime soon. Forty percent of business to consumer markets said email impact was increasing significantly and twenty nine percent said email impact was increasing. That is sixty nine percent and a clear winner. An even higher number was reported in business to business markets where they reported a thirty five point six percent significant impact and a forty two point four percent increased impact.

The last major tool you can use to increase your online marketing conversion is marketing surveys. Here once more people will ask me “but why haven’t you included surveys in the market research stage?”.  Don’t worry, I will. We just haven’t arrived there yet, but I am using surveys as a conversion tool because they are one of the most effective ways to increase sales.

So, when a product you are selling is not quite selling enough, conduct a survey. When you want to add a back end product to your mix … survey. When you want to know how to sell your product better or get innovative input on new features … survey!

These four conversion methods will all be explored in detail as we progress with this blog. Stay tuned for more marketing plan information and upcoming tools.

A Marketing Plan Blueprint Can Make Sense

Author: Scott Holden – TrafficEraBlog