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Strategy & Basic Marketing Plan for Webmasters
By By Jean-Christophe Gramont
Should you run a single site or a mega sponsor program? Basic marketing rules apply. The business marketing models that worked for years in the old economy are not so useful to us now.
The first step to designing your own marketing plan is to analyze your individual situation.
Analysis
The first consideration in the development of your marketing plan is to study the internal and external aspects of your site/sponsor program. This study can be accomplished quite fast. You will have to determine the strengths and weaknesses of your company, as well as the opportunities, but also external risks that threaten your company. When you decide on your strategy, you have to put the stress on your strengths and discover how to reduce your weaknesses.
Sales Forecasts
The second step consists of setting up sales objectives for your site/company. In this step you will have to compare the resources of your company/site, and the potential of the market. Your sales objectives have to be compatible with the capacity of your company. Those forecasts are a guide that will help you to take the right direction, but they have to be realistic. If you work by yourself four hours per day, don't expect to have 1000 sign-ups per day, and guarantee customer service, technical maintenance, marketing and back office functions all by yourself!
Positioning
When you are ready to position your site/sponsor program, you will first have to determine the current positions of the other sites/sponsor programs. You will have to find something unique to make the surfer choose your site instead of one of your competitors…Therefore, you will have to determine a real advantage, a unique characteristic, compared to your competitors, and of course you will have to keep your promise. That is to say, don't offer a free tour that describes a service that you don't offer in the member's area.
Target market
When you target a market you have to analyze first the potential of demand of this market and its characteristics. The common mistake that we see very often from webmasters is that they translate a few pages in a foreign language with an automated translated tool, and expect to see sign-ups or generate dialer revenues…In reality, things are a little bit more complicated, and webmasters should do their homework seriously to expect to make money in a new market. If you seriously analyze a market, you might discover that for legal reasons, or because of the non-existance of billing solutions, it's a waste of time. It may also be a failure for technical reasons (you offer broadband content and a particular country's surfers are mainly equipped with modems). When the study is seriously conducted, you will have to enter this new target market slowly, offering a few services, and then see the reaction of the surfers. If the reaction is good, you might think of investing more money, and expanding the services you offer.
Marketing Mix
The marketing mix is the mix of four variables that a company can control and adapt to achieve the sales forecasts. You have to determine your own mix strategy for the success of your company. The mix has four elements (The 4Ps):
Product: your site/sponsor program ; How is it different or better than your competitors' ?
Place: Distribution = The Internet. It means in theory that the distribution is automatically worldwide, but we've seen that it still takes a detailed market strategy to achieve this.
Promotion: Consider all the ways to communicate with and attract webmaster attention: Press releases and board participation on the webmaster resource sites, joining news groups, advertising in magazines, banners, trade shows, etc…
Price: What price should you charge the surfer member? To help you to determine the price in the various markets, you can use the Big Mac Index.
The Economist's Big Mac index (www.economist.com) is based on the theory of "purchasing-power parity." That is to say, according to the purchase power of individuals in the world, the Economist has created a chart of the price you have to pay for a Big Mac all over the world. This shows you big differences between purchase power in various parts of the world, and shows you that the price you will charge for a membership may also depend on the country where the surfer lives.
He are a few examples. The complete chart can be found at www.oanda.com/products/bigmac/bigmac.shtml
In order to find your perfect marketing mix, you will have to be successful in determining your target market. It is very important to understand that the four variables of the mix are interdependent. In many cases, the modification of one of these elements will have consequences on one or more of the others. In a future Klixxx article I will discuss the manipulation and adjustment of these four variables to help you achieve your goals.
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