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| How to Develop a Web Marketing Plan An effective web marketing plan needs to be comprehensive, logically organized, and efficient. It needs to cover the basic essentials, Internet advertising opportunities, advanced features, and interactive PR in order to effectively generate leads and raise your online visibility. Here are the essentials of a successful web marketing and PR program plan. 1. Develop a solid website. Your website is the starting point, and focal point, for all online marketing and PR efforts. This includes website strategy, graphic design, content writing, navigation and usability, as well as developing clean code and verifying its compliance. 2. Perform search engine optimization (SEO) activities. This includes generating meta tags and image alt tags and registering your site with the major search engines. Once internal SEO activities are complete, you can turn your attention to external SEO (obtaining relevant links), which leads into the next step... 3. Identify related sites for linking, listing and Internet advertising opportunities. This is a tedious but important effort: run the 6-12 search phrases most relevant to your website through the three major search engines (or at least through Google). Use a spreadsheet to identify every site that appears in the top 20 positions for each term. Capture just the main URL, not individual pages; for sites that appear repeatedly, note how many times they appear. The resulting list will contain (in addition to your competitors, obviously), publications, blogs, portals and directory sites. These are the key sites to target for reciprocal or non-reciprocal links, listings, and online advertising opportunities, as well as interactive PR activities. 4. Develop an online lead-generation program. Internet marketing and advertising can take many forms, from search engine ads to ad networks, white paper promotion, sponsorships and newsletter ads, which leads into... 5. Design an email advertising program. This may include email blasts to a rented list or your own internal house list for lead generation. For nurturing long-term leads, a well-written internal newsletter is a productive way to stay in touch. 6. Utilize blogs, podcasts and webcasts. A blog is a powerful (and virtually free) way to create and foster a dialog with your prospects and customers, but it requires a fairly substantial investment of time and intellectual effort to keep it fresh. To be effective, new posts must be added every 3-7 days. If you aren't able to make that commitment, consider developing relationships with influential bloggers in your industry as part of your interactive PR efforts, or periodically "guest blogging" on one or more these blogs. Podcasts and webcasts are alternative presentation methods for white paper-like content; help the audience solve a problem or better understand an industry issue, "sponsored" by your company. 7. Create and post interactive product demos to your website. For software products, tools such as Camtasia and Captivate enable you to capture screen shots and actions, control the timing, add voice-over narration, and convert the finished product for use on the web. For other types of products, use video converted to Flash or QuickTime, or (if your budget is more limited), an interactive PowerPoint presentation converted to Flash. 8. Develop an interactive PR program. Use tactics such as online press room, blogs, social tagging and a web-based PR distribution service such as PRWeb or MarketWire to disseminate your press releases. 9. Finally, test, modify, and retest until you get everything—content, landing pages, contact forms, online ads—right, by using actionable web analytics. Why Write a Blog for Business? How to Create an Effective Business Blog Search Engine Optimization Basics How to Write Effective Email Newsletters Guide to Web-Based B2B Lead Generation Programs |
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