In recent weeks, we’ve noticed many business owners and marketers are doing last-minute planning for 2013. In many cases, planning has been delayed due to an air of uncertainty that exists in many markets or businesses have been so busy that 2013 planning has taken a back-seat. If, for whatever reason, you need create an internet marketing plan…keep reading.
Yesterday, we just launched a new template in our inbound marketing resources section called the GCPT Internet Marketing Plan Template. We’ve been using this very straight-forward template to simplify planning for both clients & Knowmad.
The template was created based on a presentation at Inbound 2012, the annual Hubspot User Conference. Colleen Carney (@collcarney) presented a simple internet marketing plan, proposing a framework called GCPT which stands for goal, challenge, plan and timeline. Using the ideas in Colleen’s presentation, we created a GCPT Internet Marketing Plan template and started using it in our own planning, as well as planning for our clients.
This simple idea is a powerful tool. By narrowing the planning down to these 4 steps, aligning the goal with the challenges, planned activities and timeline is a natural outcome.
Goal Discovery
The key to this approach is accurate goal setting. Too often, a lack of traffic masquerades as the solution to poor Internet Marketing performance. While that may be an accurate assessment at times, generating more traffic isn’t always the answer.
Colleen’s presentation contains three real-world examples of accurate diagnosis and goal setting. I highly recommend her presentation, “The Best Marketing Plan You’ve Ever Written“.
Included in the list below are some common examples of problems and related goals.
- Low traffic; low conversions; poor sales leads: Consider adding more offers & ways to increase quality traffic & visibility.
- Reasonable traffic; low conversions; poor sales leads: You may want to add more offers & opportunities for conversions, then evaluate & improve bottom-of-funnel offers.
- Reasonable traffic; high visitor conversions; poor sales leads: Evaluate & improve bottom-of-funnel offers.
This list is just an example. If you have questions about your specific situation or need Internet Marketing support, please contact us for a free, no-commitment Inbound Marketing assessment.
