The E-Marketing Plan

The notepad that Tweets

Chapter three of our textbook goes into detail on how to create an e-marketing plan. The seven steps are as follows:

1. Situation Analysis: This is the environmental scan, the SWOT (internal strengths and weaknesses, and external opportunities and threats). This allows a company to see what they can and can't do, where they need to improve, what opportunities they might be able to explore, and what their competition is doing. In some cases, the SWOT for a company's online presence might be different than the SWOT for the company's brick-and-mortar store.

2. E-Marketing Strategic Planning: In this step, the company does a market opportunity analysis (MOA) to better understand their target market. This is also where a company can determine things like differentiation and positioning.

3. Objectives: In order for an objective to take form, it must have a task and a time frame, and it must be measurable.

4. Strategies: This concerns the 4 P's of Product, Price, Place, Promotion.

5. Implementation Plan: Here, marketers implement their objectives effectively, with an emphasis on information-gathering tactics

6. Budget: The most important aspect of budget is the ROI (return on investment) and the cost/benefit analysis of the strategic plan.

7. Evaluation: Evaluation should be a continuous thing. This way, if numbers or profits start to drop, it will be easy to correct the problem in a timely manner, because you will have tracked the success of the plan from the start.

If all else fails (or you're just plan lazy), you can always do what Twitter founder Jack Dorsey did: skip all the steps and just write it out on a legal pad:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bf/Twttr_sketch-Dorsey-2006.jpg

Hey, if it worked for Twitter (with over 100 million registered users as of September 2011), why not?