Internet marketing | 7 steps to creating a marketing strategy

By Jennifer Paddock

If you are interested in this topic, take a look at our University of Cape Town Internet Marketing course.

Step 1: Know Yourself and Know Your Market
"Yourself" in this context refers to the organisation as a whole. The first thing to ensure before embarking on the creation of a marketing strategy is to know who "you" are. This may need to be addressed time and time again as the organisation changes through expansion or the introduction of new products. Ask yourself the following questions:

• What is the nature of the organisation at this time?
• Who are the organisation's customers and what are their needs?
• How can the organisation meet and fulfill the needs of its customers?
• In what social context does the organisation operate in?

Step 2: Strategic Analysis
Now that you have a good understanding of your organisation you need to systematically analyse and evaluate its environmental and social context as well as its objectives and strategies in order to identify its weaknesses and opportunities.

Step 3: Set Marketing Objectives
Ask yourself these questions:

• What are the desired and intended outcomes of the marketing strategy?
• What specific goals will indicate that the marketing strategy has been successful?

Your answers should be unique to the organisation and the outcomes, if achieved, should make money for the organisation.

Step 4: Generate Strategies and Tactics for Achieving Objectives
Now that you are clear as to the organisation's objectives, consider strategies and tactics that will make help to make these objectives achievable. For example, if your objective is the acquisition of new customers, display advertising on relevant content websites could be a tactic used to achieve this.

Step 5: Evaluate Strategies
Once your strategies and tactics have been generated it is useful to undergo Humphrey's SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis to evaluate the strategies and tactics against the organisation's needs (ie. long-term goals, short-term objectives and return on investment) and its resources (ie. in house talent and staff, budget and contracted agencies). A SWOT analysis will unveil the attractiveness and viability of the proposed strategies and tactics.

Step 6: Implement
You've done all the homework and your plan is now ready to be launched. Implement it.

Step 7: Track, Analyse, Optimise

The main advantage of eMarketing versus the more traditional methods of offline marketing is that it can be tracked, the data can be analysed and this can then be fed back into the planning and optimisation of the present and future marketing strategy.

Back to SmartyPants Newsletter - December 2009 Edition