A Sample Internet Marketing Plan, by NerdyMind [Updated April 2018]

Posted on December 16, 2013 | by Mary Merritt | Comments

This post was updated in April 2018.

We've had a lot of you fine folks ask us about internet marketing plans. What do they look like? How much do they cost? Well, we wanted to end the mystery and give you a quick idea of what an internet marketing plan could look like. Surely many companies would document this differently, and the resulting strategy always depends on your budget, industry, internal organization, and many other factors as well.

Speaking of budgets: You should have one. Before you start your search for the right company to help you build and maintain your plan, you should try to decipher what the business value of having an online presence would be. How many leads does your online presence bring in yearly? How many sales? How much revenue? You should consider spending anywhere from 7-10% of that number on internet marketing per year. For example, if your website is responsible for $100,000 of your company's yearly revenue, you should consider spending about $7,000-$10,000 per year on traffic-generation, content management, user testing and general data-driven updates.

Internet Marketing Plan Example

Just so we have a frame of reference, let's pretend that we have been presented with a $2,500/month budget. The company in question is interested in getting more leads from their website. Since ours is such a dynamic industry, we plan out the first 3 months to include some discovery work. This is meant to set a very solid foundation for ongoing SEO, paid placement and regular content marketing.

We will also want to sit down with our clients and come to an agreement on what a "WIN" actually means. To define the success before any rubber hits the road is a great way to get started. All of our decisions should have your organizational goals in mind, and how we mutually define success should support those goals.

Here are the first three months of a sample internet marketing strategy:

MONTH ONE (Discovery & Onsite Optimization):

• Define internet marketing program WINS with the entire group - discuss overall business goals in more depth
  
• Research and collaborate to discover high-volume, industry-relevant keywords and phrases customers would type into search engines to find your products and services
• Map out each page of the website and decide what primary and secondary keywords each page should target
• Creating an SEO Plan that outlines search-friendly meta data for each page of the website
  • Make sure each page has a unique, designated meta title, meta description and page title utilizing content-relevant keywords
• Implement the SEO plan in the current website
• Set annotations in Google Analytics to mark when changes were made (makes for great "before and after" reporting)
• Group keywords by theme and create campaign and ad group structures for paid search in Google AdWords
• Create the next month's content and blogging editorial calendar

MONTH TWO (Building Digital Marketing Channels):

Now that the website is fully optimized for high-volume and industry-relevant keywords, it sets a beautiful stage for on-going search engine optimization, paid placement, display advertising and content marketing in general. We can seed blog post ideas to the group, assign writers to each topic and add it all to our living, breathing editorial calendar. Before we can get to all of that, we'll take some time to set up your accounts, build out your campaigns and more:

• Plan out and build specific conversion-optimized landing pages to support all of our paid search & social campaigns. We want to make sure every penny you spend in paid placement is as relevant to the user's search as possible. This lowers your overall CPC (cost per click) because Google trusts that you are truly trying to give the user what they are seeking.
• Set up Google AdWords and other paid search accounts (Microsoft AdCenter, LinkedIn, AdRoll), building out the campaign and ad group structure that was crafted in the first month of discovery work
  
• Evaluate social platform advertising options - Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, and more offer self-managed paid advertising platforms with highly customizable audience targeting
• Build out highly targeted campaigns on the social media platforms that make the most sense for your business - make sure tracking is in place using tracking pixels or UTA parameters in the destination URL
  
• Are we doing any Display Advertising? We'll need graphics to support those campaigns. This is when we would build out a library of standard-sized display ads to support various campaigns.
• Create remarketing audience in Google Analytics and connect it with AdWords so we can show ads to previous website visitors
• We're writing. While all of this other stuff is happening, we are taking care of the first month's blog posts and scheduling some social posts to properly syndicate our new unique content
• Once all of this is complete, we will launch our paid placement campaigns!
• We'll set our annotations in Google Analytics to mark when we made these changes (makes for great "before and after" reporting)

MONTH THREE (Maintenance Mode):

At this point, we've worked on your onsite optimization (page titles, meta descriptions, URL structure, page headers and more). We've taken some time to create some great blog categories, the editorial calendar is set up and constantly evolving, and we've set up all of your paid search, social, and display campaigns. It's all running, but this is not a "set and forget" type of situation. We need to constantly stay on top of these items. Here are some of the exercises we will engage in when maintaining and evolving your accounts:

• It goes without saying that REPORTING IS OUR FRIEND. We will constantly run reports and monitor your campaigns
  
• We like to have a bi-weekly integrated marketing meeting with our clients to go over reporting and data-driven insights. This way, we can discuss the changes we want to make to the accounts and why
• Normally we will write 1-2 blog posts every month, so we will spend time researching and writing these pieces of content
• We will enhance and amplify our blog efforts by planning social media posts and engagement throughout the month. By planning your social media efforts in an editorial calendar you can craft a strategy for the month, and coordinate your messaging between various social platforms
• We will create valuable, educational, and entertaining premium content documents, graphics, and other assets, and offer them as downloads to interested visitors. Not only does this offer value to visitors and prove subject-matter expertise, but it allows us to engage with visitors at the top of the sales funnel (awareness), who otherwise wouldn’t be ready to get in touch
• Premium content downloads can be offered in exchange for an email address, giving us the perfect opportunity to build an email automation campaign that will email the downloader a series of emails after delivering their download. These emails reinforce brand awareness, build the relationship with the receiver, and offer users additional information and up-sells to related services or products
• We will start searching for relevant blogs and other related websites to start some community outreach work. Once we make some great contacts and have devised a strategy, we'll work to bring your website quality and legitimate backlinks
• We'll meet with any other writers to make sure they are staying on track. We'll try to work a minimum of 1 month out on regular content, but we will leave room for the last-minute items that always pop up (new press releases, press mentions, awards, product releases, seasonal campaigns, and more)

As you can probably imagine, there are going to be different mixes of services (such as email marketing, social media management, affiliate marketing, and more), different budgets, different internal organizations, and more. As stated earlier, each internet marketing plan should be truly tailored to your very specific business goals. It seems simple, right? Well, let's just say that it is a great exercise to revisit the goals and wins from time-to-time to make sure they are up-to-date with your ever-changing business atmosphere. If you are in a very dynamic industry (like ours, for example), it is vitally important to be adaptable. One of the NERDS said to me the other day: "I can't believe how much we've changed in less than two years." Too true he was.

We hope this helps end some of the mysteries!