1
Your Overall
Marketing Plan
2
3 Lesson 5 objectives
Marketing Plan
Contents
4 Your marketing plan needs to answer
5 Marketing sales funnel
6 Organic marketing
7 SEO - Search Engine Optimisation
Keywords
9 Influencers & Affiliates
Who are these people?
10 Where would you find them?
11 Paid advertising
Facebook
12 Minimum monthly budget
3
Lesson 5 Objectives
Questions your marketing plan needs to answer
Understand what makes a channel organic
Get an introduction to affiliates
Learn how to get started with paid ads
Marketing
Plan
By now you know your target
audience, and you have your
business goals. Social Media Magazines
How are you going to reach that
audience and achieve those Shopping Malls Events
goals?
Radio Family & Friends
Think about all the ways people
are exposed to businesses: Work Instant Messaging
Email Streaming
Exhibitions Promo stands
Flyers Podcasts
Newspapers Browsing
Street Poles TV
4
Your Marketing Plan needs to
answer: NOTES
• Where and when will I engage with my target market?
• What will I use to engage them and how will I create this?
• Which objectives are these platforms (e.g. Facebook) meeting?
• What will good performance look like?
Important: This is a very high-level overview, more research is required.
Consider taking up Shaw Academy’s Social Media Marketing and Digital
Marketing courses for an in-depth breakdown.
Are you going to use images? Videos? Events? Flyers?
How are you going to create these things – DIY or will you outsource
someone? Why are you on these platforms and do they suit your objectives?
E.g. Awareness, Sales, Retention.
Look at the table above again – these are all the different places you can
connect with your audience. You don’t need to be on all of them, but you
have many options and for each one you need a plan.
Paid media is media you pay for – e.g. you pay every time someone clicks on your Facebook ad (different to a Facebook post!)
Earned media is potential consumers you have attracted without having to advertise / make a payment.
5
Marketing Sales Funnel
Consumers go through several stages before making Desire
a purchase, and in each stage their behaviour and the Visiting the website and browsing the information
information they look for is different. There are many Action
different sales funnels – it is in fact very subjective – you Completing a goal conversion offline / online
could even create your own. But the core principle is mostly
the same. Start at the beginning – start local
• Take advantage of any local marketing opportunities
AIDA there are – e.g. community notice boards, events, local
The traditional sales funnel, created in 1898. newspapers.
• Start marketing (either organic or paid) within your
Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action
local community, particularly if you have been an active
Examples of consumer actions during these phases:
member.
Awareness • Use your own network – friends, family, LinkedIn
Seeing an ad, blog post, social media connections, you name it.
• Encourage reviews of your service / product, on social
Interest
media channels and Google My Business if you have a
Visiting your website, researching your brand, following
listing (which you should!).
pages
Desire
Researching options, comparisons, submitting a lead
Action
Completing a goal / conversion e.g. sale
Examples of business actions during these phases, in
response to what consumers are doing:
Awareness
Developing content and copy for ads / blogs / social media
Interest
Offering relevant, valuable content / something else of
value e.g. promotional content
Desire
User-friendly website / “landing point” for goal conversion,
continued content and communication
Action
Clear conversion path, good user experience, excellent
customer service
Example of offline – online behaviour in AIDA
Awareness
Attending an event and picking up a flyer
Interest
Reading the details and searching online
6
Organic marketing
What is meant by organic?
People exposed to a business through earned /
natural ways vs through paid marketing
Organic examples
Word of mouth – someone recommending a
service / product
Facebook posts – followers seeing posts from
Pages they follow
Search results – using a search engine for
information
Word of mouth
Word of mouth happens both offline
and online. Examples:
• Family & friends
• Colleagues
• Influencers and affiliates
• Reviews
Social Media
• Facebook
• Instagram
• Twitter
• YouTube Lesson 6 covers some of these channels in more detail.
• LinkedIn
• Pinterest Social Media Marketing and Search Engine Marketing are all about content
– high quality content (blog posts, articles, case studies, images, videos,
e-books, pdf downloads, etc)
7
SEO – Search Engine
Optimisation
SEO is the skill of increasing ranking in the SERPs (Search Engine
Results Page)
Organic results fall below the paid ads, which take up the top 3
– 4 spots. Not all results have ads, so in those cases there would
just be organic results.
Search engines want to know:
What your website is about
How frequently your website is updated
How authoritative you are in your industry / topic
The experience of the user while on your website
There are over 200 factors that influence a website’s position on
the search results, some of which we can influence but others
we cannot. Google does not provide explicit information about
their processes.
Keywords
Keywords are one of the most important factors in your paid and organic advertising. Choosing the keywords that best suit your
business takes research.
Silvertree example:
Some of their main keywords might be:
• Jewellery
• Silver rings
• Jewellery design
These are the keywords that would need to be present in their content, to signal to Search engines that this is what their website
is about.
There are also keywords called LSI keywords – Latent Semantic Indexing. This is just the term given to the way Google associates
different keywords with each other.
8
In the past, Google would scan a website for the main keywords and accept that this was what
the website was about. Now, among other factors, Google looks for keywords associated to
the main keywords before confirming that a website is about a certain topic.
For example, associated LSI keywords for Silvertree could be:
• Gemstones
• Carat
• Emerald Cut
This provides Google with more context.
There are various sources for keyword research – start by making a list of the keywords you
think are the best fit, and build on from there.
Put your keywords into tools like:
[Link]
[Link]
You can also input your keywords into a search engine and see what other recommended
searches come up. Scroll to the bottom of the search page and see the related searches that
appear.
Do the same exercise with YouTube.
The above tools are free, though with [Link] you can pay a fee to access more
granular results.
There are many other paid tools to assist with this, as well as the Google Keyword planner,
available in the Google Ads platform.
NOTES
9
Influencers & Affiliates
Influencers
People who have influence over others i.e. impacting
their perception and purchase decisions.
Affiliates
People or entities who market your product in return for
Who are these
a % of every sale they bring in. people?
Some examples:
• Community leaders
• Industry experts
• Blogger / Vloggers
• Individuals with many social followers
• Celebrities
NOTES
10
Where would you find Examples of campaigns you could run:
them?
• In your area
• Within your network
• Social media channels
• Publications (websites, magazines, etc)
• Affiliate networks
Approaching influencers and affiliates:
• Do your research
• Be direct but not aggressive
• If you don’t know them, first introduce yourself
over time (e.g. comment on their posts, make your
presence known)
• Know exactly what you are going to offer them –
what % of each sale are you willing to pay? Or are
you going to pay them a flat fee?
• Draw up Terms of Service (rules) to protect yourself
NOTES
11
Paid Advertising
Social Media
Wherever people publish and consume content, and
interact with others, online.
Facebook
Boosting posts – promoting content posted from your
business Facebook Page
The option to boost a post is available under each post,
in most cases. When it is not available, it is because it
does not adhere to Facebook’s advertising policies.
Facebook Ads – Business Manager
Taking boosting a step further. If you have the budget,
create a Facebook Business Manager account on
[Link]
• You need to have a Facebook profile and page
• Once you have created your account, you would
link your page to it
NOTES • You can also advertise on Instagram through this
platform
Facebook ads have:
• Multiple targeting abilities
• Several campaign types to fit objectives
• The ability to target anyone who has engaged with
your content
• Requires installation of a Pixel, much like Google
Analytics (Lesson 10)
12
Google Ads – advertise across Google
Appear on the search engine results page, other
websites, within Gmail and on YouTube.
Campaign types are more suited to different
objectives:
Display campaigns – Branding and Awareness
Search campaigns – Sales, Leads
YouTube campaigns – Branding, Awareness,
Engagement
NOTES
