Creating Your Marketing Plan

Episode #9 of the course eCommerce fundamentals by Chloë Thomas

 

Welcome.

We’re on the home straight now—just two more lessons to go, both focused on your marketing.

In this lesson, I’m sharing how to pull all your research into a plan.

Your marketing plan pulls together everything covered in the course so far.

Before you get cracking with what you’ve learned from your research, you need to build a proper marketing plan. An eCommerce marketing plan should include both the channels you are going to use (for example, email, PPC, or social media) plus the messages you will be using (for example, sales, promotions, celebrity tie-ins, Father’s Day, etc.).

Remember, a good marketing plan:

• is very flexible
• considers new and existing routes to market
• fits with your branding, your eCommerce business structure and your USP
• will meet your objectives
• recognizes that you have different types of customers

These different groups of customers need to be marketed to in different ways, because the actions you want each of them to take are different:

• You need enquirers to buy for the first time
• You need buyers to buy again

Creating the Plan

There are two types of activity we need to put into our marketing plan:

• Do more of your existing activity: more emails, more keywords in Google AdWords, etc.
• Try out some new marketing areas

During your research, you should have worked out what activity you will continue as per last year, what activity you will invest more effort/money in, and what activity you will test or start. Now you can create the plan.

Your marketing plan should be in three formats; this will make it easy to do the activity, monitor the activity, and make sure everyone involved knows what is happening. The easier you make it, the more likely it is to happen.

The three formats are:

1. A Calendar of Promotional Activity. This is a month-by-month or week-by-week series of activities in each marketing channel. This forms your checklist to make sure everything is happening. If you are struggling to get started, put in what you did last year and the key dates for this year (Christmas, Easter, etc.).

2. A Financial Dashboard. A month-by-month performance tracker that has the cost and sales for each marketing channel AND your KPIs.

3. A Written Guide to the Plan. It doesn’t need to be more than a couple of pages, but if you have several people working on implementing the plan, it is critical to keep everything in line.

Start with just a six-month or three-month plan. But DON’T FORGET to create the next three months or six months before you get to the end of the first plan!

Catch up tomorrow,
Chloë

 

Recommended book

“Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising” by Ryan Holiday

 

Share with friends