Example of Online Marketing Plan for companies: 35 ideas

In this post I Aabhas Vijay from www.smtpservers.co will develop an Online Marketing Plan. I want to share this digital marketing plan with you because I think that, in some way, it can be useful for businesses as well. Many marketing ideas that we provide can be adapted and applied in other industries. We hope it will be of great help to you.

First phase of all Social Media Plan

The first thing to do to develop any Online Marketing Plan is to be clear about 3 aspects:

• What objectives does the company pursue? They all have to be concrete, measurable and calculable in time. Is the goal to increase sales? What you are after is branding , that they know the brand better? Do you want to get subscribers? Or maybe retain and retain the audience you already have so that your customers buy again?
• The second thing would be to do an internal and external SWOT analysis of the business to be clear about the strengths, weaknesses, threats and opportunities, both of the company and of the competition and the sector. Above all, it is necessary to detect and define very well the strengths of the business: how it can stand out from the competition. Through the blog? With good online service? With exclusive and free proposals for the best clients?
• Finally, you have to do a study of the target audience. What is the potential customer like? Where is it on the web? What topics interest you? How can we get to it? The profile will tell us what topics to write about and on what social networks the company will have a presence. It is not necessary for all companies to be on all social networks, only on those truly interesting for their activity and customers.

Knowing the objectives, the public and how this brand can be differentiated, we will create Online Content Marketing strategies for that audience knowing where it is and what interests it.

Let’s Look at 35 Online Marketing Ideas

Twitter, the social network to reach strangers

Twitter is one of the few social networks that allows us to reach many users unknown to us but who meet certain characteristics. The first thing a company has to think about when considering being on Twitter is if there is enough dialogue and if people are talking about your topic on this social network. These are some actions that a business can take on Twitter:

1. Think about what content you are going to share

You have to see what type of valuable content , your own or from other sources, you are going to share through Twitter. A good way to have the best content recorded and filtered is to use Feedly, a tool that allows you to place the best blogs (in this case of restoration and decoration). In this way, it is easier for you to find the really interesting articles for your audience. Another option to select content is to subscribe to the Buzzsumo tool  and have it recommend which are the most shared articles about decoration or restored furniture. When the content is yours, Twitter is the perfect platform to spread it and make it known to your followers. You can also buy Twitter followers from the tweeteev.

2. Search and participate

Twitter is a network where you have to be proactive. It is not about opening a social network and waiting for everyone to arrive, but going to find them. How can you do it? You put in the Twitter search engine “restore furniture” and you find about 800 tweets a day with that theme. What you have to do is dialogue with those users. The specific objective that you can set yourself is to talk to 10 people every day: comment on what they share, retweet it, answer their questions… It is a good strategy to make yourself known and that others begin to see that your company has an affinity with their interests. You can dedicate about 20 minutes a day to this function of talking with other users.

3. Create lists

With the lists you can highlight your audience and have your audience organized. You can create, for example, the following lists: best decoration blogs, decoration enthusiasts and companies in the sector.

Facebook, an environment of private circles

When people enter Facebook they are in their personal environment of leisure and free time. Users on Facebook are not willing to receive advertising or spam content from brands. With which, on Facebook what you are always going to pursue is to involve the people who know you, your customers. Here are some ideas to get the most out of this social network:

4. Get your clients (your ambassadors) to participate

You can organize a workshop in your store for your best customers. You invite them, you give them some advice related to the furniture they have bought or any topic about restoration, you take photos with them during the talk and you propose that they upload those images to Facebook. This is how you are encouraging participation and linking those ambassadors to your Facebook page. This is what is called an online-offline connection. Another loyalty marketing idea is to suggest to your customers that they take a photo at home with the furniture they have taken from your store and that they share it on your Facebook fan page. In return you offer them a 10% discount on their next purchase. Integrate a coupon system with the help of Free Autoresponders.

5. Find Facebook pages related to yours and participate in them

You have two types of pages. Fan Pages of the competition, of other businesses similar to yours of decoration, restoration or interior design and community pages that do not have a commercial interest and in which users who also like decoration, interior design or recycling participate. What you have to do on those pages is comment and “like” their posts. In other words, participate as one more from your fan page (not as a user), providing valuable content in the comments you leave and never writing advertising messages. This will allow the followers of these pages to know you, see your logo, see the name of your store and gain visibility in the sector.

6. Participate in groups on restoration and furniture from a user profile

In the groups can not participate from your fan page, you can only do with a user profile. You can join, for example, in a group called “Recycled and restored furniture” or in another called “Recycled furniture and paintings”. Enter, share valuable content, comment on what your users publish, resolve doubts… In order to be visible and show your business.

7. Create a secret or private group for your best clients

Every month you can add 10 or 15 new users to that secret or private group. This is what is called the “marketing technique of offering exclusive content.” In this way, you are going to make those clients feel special, you are going to share content created exclusively for them and, in addition, you are also doing customer service work because you can answer all their doubts and questions within the group.

8. Make few good posts that generate engagement

Better that than many bad or regular posts. You don’t have to publish just to publish. We give you 3 examples of good posts you can do:

Once a week, the workshop technician can dedicate 2 or 3 hours to answering questions through your Facebook page. Your clients have the option through this social network to ask their questions and have someone answer them. You are giving an extra free consulting service and, by doing it publicly, all the friends of your followers (clients) will find out that they are participating in your page.

Conclusion

The fundamental objective on Facebook is to get participation and for people to leave you comments, “like” and share what you post. That way, you will get more and more fans. Another important action that you should do is to leave your wall , leave your fan page, and make yourself visible on other pages to make yourself known. Look at our Facebook guide to Digital Marketing for companies where you will find these and other very useful tips to apply in your marketing plan.

#Facebook is going to be very good for companies that have people in the offline world.

Email, a very powerful loyalty tool

Email Marketing is still one of the most popular marketing options, it is the only secure communication method that companies have with their customers. Check out some of the best mail services here. What is the only thing that we all look at every day several times since we have it on our mobile? The email . It is one of the most powerful loyalty tools to generate interest and communication with customers. Pro Tip – Always Use SMTP Servers for sending emails.

9. The first thing you should ask yourself is how to get customer emails

A very good way to do it is to link the online with the offline. In this case, since it is a furniture store with physical headquarters, it would be very easy to print cards where you invite customers to leave their email address. You can have them on the counter, next to the cashier when they go to pay or have the friendliest employees take charge of offering them. In return, if they leave you the email, you tell them that you are going to share with them exclusive offers, specific information, the news of the season and tips for restoring or maintaining the furniture they have purchased in the store. Clients are sure to be very happy because they know that what they are going to receive is not something commercial but useful content.

10. Use tools that help you improve your Email Marketing

There are platforms like Mailchimp, Aweber or Acumba that can help you organize and manage your lists, create personalized newsletters and they will tell you who has received your emails.

Don’t you know how to create a newsletter? Don’t worry, in this article we show you what they are, how to do them and we also give you 20 Email Marketing tricks.

SEO, the most solid strategy for a long-term business

For a company, in the long run, SEO or organic search engine positioning is going to be one of its preferred online marketing strategies. The valuable content that we spread on social networks is ephemeral, it is quickly forgotten. But the one that we are going to create on the blog and on our website remains there forever. Here are some marketing ideas that you can put into practice on your website and blog:

11. Keyword search

They are those terms used by people when they search the Internet for a topic. Those words give you clues of what the user demand is and, therefore, content ideas to talk about on your blog. To find your keywords you can use various tools. We are going to recommend Google Trends and Google AdWords.

• Google Trends tells you the search trends by words. You can know, for example, what is most sought after: “furniture restoration”, “restored furniture” or “vintage furniture”. You can know the number of times those words have been searched in Spain in recent months, something that will be very useful to know what people are looking for the most on the web and what you can write about.
• Another tool to know the keywords is Google AdWords. If you enter several terms such as “furniture restoration”, “furniture restoration”, “restored furniture” or “restore” it tells you the number of searches that have been made per month in Spanish. We have done the test and we have found that the words “decoration”, “modern living rooms”, “cheap cabinets”, “vintage furniture”, “restore furniture” and “restored furniture” have between 1000 and 4000 searches per month. With which, you already know that from those words you are interested in creating your content. This will give you keys for both SEO and SEM, that is, for the creation of ads and campaigns on the Internet.

12. Make a list of 30 or 40 possible article titles for your blog with all the keywords you have collected

For titles, keep in mind, above all, two things: they must have a maximum of 60 characters and you should put the maximum possible number of keywords in each one. Some ideas of titles for your store can be “how to restore a furniture in 5 steps”, “10 ideas to create your own cheap vintage furniture”, “how to transform classic and old furniture” or “25 ways to recycle a wooden platform. Of the 30 or 40 possible topics you have to see which are the most interesting. To do this, ask your environment, your own employees, look at the doubts that your customers usually have and get into decoration forums.

13. Try to participate as a collaborator or guest in the best decorating blogs and publications in the sector

Always writing articles with valuable content, never advertising. This strategy suits you, above all, at first because nobody knows you and it is a way to gain presence, visibility and notoriety. At the end of the post it would be great if they let you link to your blog.

14. Use the “give your product away” technique

From time to time, organize workshops and courses on furniture restoration in your store and invite the top 20 decoration bloggers. On the one hand, you give them exclusive content of value and, on the other hand, you are ensuring visibility on their web pages. Many of them will be encouraged and will write a post about the workshop they have attended. This is an action to get links known as link building .

15. Have the references, the best bloggers and the most important web pages in the sector registered

You are interested in maintaining a close relationship with them on social networks . Follow them, comment and share what they publish, mention them from time to time … In this way, you will get more links, shares and a greater dissemination of your content.

You also have to take care of some more technical aspects, what is called SEO on page . In other words, do everything possible so that the business website complies with the standards, usability and architecture required by Google to position it well.

16. Avoid duplicate content

Do not copy content from other websites, nothing that is text.

17. Pay attention to the links that come from other websites

If you have previously bought links in bulk or have some links from low quality web pages, it is best to try to unlink them.

18. Take care of the speed of the web

You have to try to make the page speed fast because Google takes it into account.

19. Take care of usability

You should try to make your page easy to use: that people find what they are looking for, that they do not get lost and that the visits last a long time on the page. The length of stay is important. Try to make your website a little longer and include a video so that users stay longer watching your content.

The blog is the axis of your online marketing strategy, use keywords and add value.

Geolocation, place your business on the map

It consists of your business appearing well placed on the maps and your company marketing in a more local way. In this case, as it is a store with a physical location, geolocation is a fundamental section. The main tool to do this is Google Maps . These are the steps you must follow:

20. The first thing you should do is create a company page on Google Plus

To do so, you will find three options. You have to choose the first or the second. It will automatically redirect you to Google Maps, that’s where you have to register your business and when you verify it, it will start to appear on the map.

21. Once your furniture store is visible, the next thing you need to get are reviews

That is, positive messages that users leave about you in that geolocation. You can ask for reviews from store employees, best customers, family, friends… It would be nice to have a minimum of 5 or 6 favorable comments.

Youtube, audiovisual content positions very well

YouTube is one of the most important social networks. For certain topics, multimedia content, tutorials and everything that you can teach in a more visual way works better than textual information. The videos have a lot of preference for positioning. In addition, YouTube is increasingly going to take over not only our computers and mobile devices, but also our televisions in our living rooms. More and more televisions have Internet access and we always recommend frequent use of YouTube.

Your online marketing strategy on YouTube should be similar to that of the blog, but instead of making valuable content in the form of an article, you will do it with the video format. So all the keyword study we talked about before, you will also have to use it to think about what topics you are going to make your videos about.

22. Think of ways to make low-budget videos

You can record, for example, the workshops to restore furniture that you organize in your store. For this, you can use a GoPro camera or any home camera, because in reality now they all give a fairly professional quality. For videos, the most important thing is the stability of the image and that the light is good. We recommend the face-to-face course on Graphic and Audiovisual Design, also available in an online version, so that you can learn to make quality videos and use the correct tools for it.

23. Account restoration processes

Another video idea is that once a month an artisan from your workshop tells you step by step the process of restoring a piece of furniture. For example, a possible title could be “how to paint your old furniture in 5 steps.”

24. Solve doubts on video

A good option would be for customers to send you their questions and once a month you make a video solving all those doubts. It is a good way, on the one hand, to request participation and, on the other, you are offering valuable content that is already demanded by your followers, with which you are ensuring that the video will like it.

25. Spread your videos

Apart from uploading the videos to your YouTube channel, it is very important that you share them on social networks and on your blog. From time to time, you can embed the videos in your articles to ensure their dissemination.

26. Transcribe your videos

Something also essential is that you transcribe the content of the videos, because Google does not recognize it and needs you to tell it in text form. If the video has been included in an article, the ideal is to transcribe it there. But if you have not included it in your blog, you can transcribe it in the “description” section of YouTube itself.

Pinterest, the perfect network to collect content

Pinterest is an alternative social network that will depend a lot on the type of business. In this case, since it is a furniture store, you may be interested in being on Pinterest. The main feature of this social network is that it allows curating content, that is, selecting and collecting, above all, images.

27. Go to Pinterest, open an account and create different boards

In this case, you can make boards of the best cabinets (original, of different colors and shapes), night tables, headboards … With this you will be able to inspire people, connect with a community interested in furniture and learn more about your sector.

An advice. Do not spend a lot of time a day on this social network, 5 minutes is enough. It is a very simple tool and in a couple of clicks you can collect the content.

Instagram, a visual network to encourage participation

Companies that have offline customers, who are capable of building loyalty and transmitting things in person are the ones that can work best on this social network. Two visual resources are used on Instagram: the photo and the video. We suggest three specific proposals:

28. Make montages with the photos of your followers

For every four photos that customers upload to your Facebook page, you can put them together in a collage and post them on your Instagram profile.

29. Create video tutorials with tricks

Take video tutorials with simple restoration or recycling tips: “How to reuse a shoe box” or “How to create a Christmas tree out of toilet paper rolls.” We say keep it simple because you have to remember that Instagram allows you to share videos of up to 15 seconds, no more. An option that you should take advantage of and that you can take advantage of a lot.

30. Post a before and after photo of all the furniture you restore in your store

It has to be a single image divided into two and you can ask your followers: which one do you like the most? Guess what the before and after is? What restoration tasks do you think we have done? In this way you invite participation.

Instagram is establishing itself as the perfect platform to encourage participation.

Ads, punctual help and perfect complement to SEO

There is a wide range of advertising opportunities on the Internet. Here are some interesting options:

31. Google AdWords

It is the Google Ads program and has two networks:

• Search network
• Display network
• Highly recommended. If you choose this option you have to make text ads that later appear in the Google search engine. It is very positive to create these ads because the purchase intention of the customer when he sees it is very advanced. The customer is searching when your ad appears, so you are going to have a good chance that they will click, go to your store and buy the product or at least know you.

32. Facebook Ads

They are Facebook advertising campaigns. Here your ads will be shown to people with a specific profile. You will be able to segment so that the ad, for example, is seen by women who live in Madrid, between 30 and 50 years old and who are interested in decoration and furniture. You can also promote your posts. This is highly recommended, especially when you start because you still will not have a significant number of followers and you are interested in investing 20 or 30 euros for a few months to reach more people of your target audience. We recommend that you look at our Facebook ads guide where we explain all the functions and how to optimize your ads.

33. Twitter Ads

Twitter ads are similar to Facebook ads . It also allows you to run campaigns and segment them, for example, by keywords. These ads can be shown to people looking for “restored furniture”, “decoration furniture”, “interior design”… Something that you can also do on Twitter Ads is showing the ad to followers of a specific account. In this case, you still want your campaigns to be seen by Ikea followers. See how to do it in our guide to make ads on Facebook Ads.

34. Video ads

Specifically, you can create a video-ad that appears on the YouTube channel of a company that interests you, such as Leroy Merlin or Bricomanía. In this way, users who are watching Bricomanía videos will find yours as recommended.

35. Remarketing

It is a technique that is very fashionable and that all companies are interested in doing. It consists of showing your ad to people who have previously visited your website. They are users who already know you, have already shown an interest in you and with remarketing you are reminding them that you are there.

Conclusion

As you may have noticed, there are aspects that are important for almost any business:

• Referral marketing. Try to make your customers think about your product, do not have your community manager saying all day how good you are.
• The content marketing, which is to provide valuable content for your community and have a reason to follow you and link you to share you.
• The loyalty marketing, which involves dealing well with customers who already know you, offer them something extra for free. You are not going to get any economic benefit from that, but you are going to get those customers to buy more and be more hooked on your brand.
• The last recommendation is that your business is the best possible. Social networks are a channel of transparency that allow people to freely comment and investigate the opinions of other consumers. Social Networks have not been invented to deceive customers. With which, if your company is not good, you do not offer a good service or have a good product, run away from online.

About the Author

Aabhas Vijay is a digital marketer and blogger, He started the blog on SMTP Protocol work where he discusses his own experiences with it.