Marketing Plan Components: 4 Essential Elements

A marketing plan is essential for a business organization or website for achieving organizational goals . The importance of the plan cannot be overestimated for the success or failure of a business, whether online or offline.

There are four important components of a marketing plan:

1) Market Research

The marketing plan must include strategies and tools for market research.  This involves understanding the volume of demand , consumer trends and purchaser demographics .

2) Website Design

Your website must not only look likeable and professional but also be functional.  This means it must have ease of navigation and be fast-to-load.  It can be appropriate to hire a professional web designer to get the best mix of aesthetics and functionality.  Alternatively, there are a number of platforms that offer a point-and-click technology to enable anyone to build a professional and functional website.

3) Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

The success of your website and marketing plan will depend on search engine optimization (SEO).  People have to be able to find your website and SEO facilitates search by making it clear to search engines what your site is about.  Increasingly web designers are moving away from static websites to building websites on a WordPress blog platform.  This takes advantage of the inherent SEO capability of blogs but also facilitates the use of a range of SEO plug-ins.

4) Traffic Generation

The marketing plan must incorporate ways to attract traffic to your website.  There is little use having an aesthetically satisfying and exceedingly functional website, if noone ever visits it.  There are now numerous strategies for gaining traffic from both paid and unpaid sources.  A sound marketing plan will identify traffic sources and help you build a traffic generation strategy that is not expensive.

You can hire a professional to develop your marketing plan or use one of the do-it-yourself marketing plans.  There are a number of such plans that are effectively “paint-by-numbers”.  These easy to implement marketing plans provide detailed strategies and tactics and are supported by checklists and examples of successful implementation.  Additionally, the better ones illustrate how a newbie followed the plan to achieve success.