Failing to Plan is like Planning to Fail
Marketing planning plays a vital role in successful ecommerce web design.
How well you market your online shop, along with a few other considerations, will ultimately
determine your degree of success or failure.
The key element of a successful ecommerce marketing plan is to know your customers - their likes,
dislikes and expectations.
By identifying these factors, you can develop a marketing strategy and web design that will allow
you to arouse and fulfill their needs.
Effective Planning
Effective marketing planning never finishes - you keep doing it, at least on a monthly cycle - it needs to be a
basic part of your management tool-kit.
A commonly mis-understood key fact about planning is that it is not something you create and then put
in the drawer - it is not a fixed thing that once right is then always right.
It is a map of the best way from here to there - by definition each day 'here' changes - often good
un-expected opportunities come up, so 'there' immediately changes - and without fail problems occur,
so 'best' changes also.
The plan is a way to link these variables together in an optimum manner - so when a variable changes,
the plan quickly shows how best to respond to the change in order to restore that optimality.
The First Analysis
Develop a business plan for your online shop by thinking carefully about what you are trying to do.
Write it all down on paper, because at the very least this is a wonderful way to ground your thinking.
Identify your customers by their age, sex, income/educational level and residence. At first, target only
those customers who are more likely to purchase your product or service. As your customer base expands,
you can consider modifying the marketing plan to include other customers.
So your planning should at least address questions such as:
- Who are your customers?
- Can you clearly define your target market?
- What are the demographics for this market?
- What is/are your product/s?
- What is your Unique Selling Proposition?
- What are your pricing/delivery/service strategies?
- How will you make money from selling this product?
- Why should your market buy from you?
- What is it you do better that anyone else?
- What knowlege do you have of your competition?
1. Set Your Objectives
Use analysis of all of the above information to develop your objective and your USP.
Objective setting is something that we all know how to do, and in small ways we do it every day -
but often we fail to do it properly in the business planning context. In order to form a viable
internet marketing plan it is essential to crystalise and set out on paper the things you are
trying to achieve with the website.
2. Develop Strategies
Use marketing planning to develop your strategies. Develop your core competences and address your USP -
explain to your target market why there is no doubt it is best for them to buy from your shop.
You have to detail exactly what steps you will take to ensure that customers know about your product
and prefer it over the competition. Be as detailed as you can, and outline several different tactics
if possible.
3. Assess What Happened
It is absolutely essential to know what is happening in your business - in figures, on paper. It doesn't
have to be rocket science, but you need a good standard set of numbers - sales forecasts,
profit-and-loss projections, cash flow projections and management ratios.
Recording systems don't need to be complicated - forget about management information systems - it could
possibly be manual book-keeping in a school exercise book, but you need to know what is happening up to
the minute.
1. Again...
Back to analysis - go through your assessment and ruthlessly figure out where things went different to
plan - equally ruthlessly figure out why - and use this information to question the validity of your
objectives - if your assessment was not exactly on your planning figures, then you at least need to
revise your strategies.
And around we go again...
Revised: 8th October 2004
©2004
