If you have launched a new site or are planning a major sales blitz this year you might want to consider the Online Business Marketing Plan Development process from RetailBizMD, created using our extensive “on the job” experience.

The RetailBizMD.com marketing plan step 1 – Profile your customer

Your online marketing strategy should start with a profile of your customer. You create a customer profile by asking yourself these questions:

• Is your customer a male or a female?
• Does your customer work from home or in a corporate setup?
• Is your customer a parent, worker, business person, corporate executive?
• What would be the household income of your customer?
• Is your customer an educated person?
• Would it be a one-time purchase or a periodic purchase?
• Do you think your customer is a net savvy person?
• If your customer is net savvy, what type of websites would your customer visit?

When you write down the answers to the above questions, you will have a fairly good idea of the content for your online marketing strategy and where and how to deliver the message.

The RetailBizMD.com marketing plan step 2 – Location targeting

All your online customers will frequent certain types of websites. The answer to “which type” will be in the customer profile that you’ve created by following the RetailBizMD.com marketing plan step 1.

Your marketing message will have to be placed in a selection from amongst the best sites – these would be sites with high traffic volumes. You can find out traffic volumes and cost by communicating with the site administrators or designated ad managers. Note down the name of the site, traffic volumes and costs. While at it, you should also consider placing your advertisements in related sites. Remember that in online marketing strategy, marketing success, quality advertisements and visibility are all inter-related.

The RetailBizMD.com marketing plan step 3 – The Budget

By now your online marketing strategy is taking shape and you have a good idea of the costs involved. If you feel it exceeds the amount you intended to spend, re-visit each and every site in your ad list starting from the bottom and see if you can eliminate any. If you are left with six or less sites than you might want to consider increasing the ad spend figure you had in mind. The “something is better than nothing” rule will only create a trickle of customers and frustration.

The RetailBizMD.com marketing plan step 4 – Creating the ad message

Internet marking works best only when you focus on the emotional factor of your best selling product or service. For example, if you’re selling lipsticks, you are selling beauty. Your ad probably has three seconds or less to capture your customer’s attention so you need to hit hard with minimum of words and images.

The RetailBizMD.com marketing plan step 5 – Tracking and monitoring

The only way you’ll ever know if your online marketing strategy has worked or not is by using online software provided by the sites on which your ads are running and comparing the figures with independent monitoring facilities provided by third-parties including Google analytics.

Finally, you might want to consider teaming up with marketing experts such as RetailBizMD.com to help remove the risk of failure or worse, advertisements that create a negative impact.