Purpose

The purpose of the Course Project is to demonstrate mastery of Terminal Course Objectives by developing a Marketing Plan for an E-commerce website.

The E-commerce website your select for the Marketing Plan can be a real company or one you create for the purpose of the assignment. This can be a business-to-consumer company, or a business-to-business company. You may select any industry of personal interest, as long as the primary business of the company is selling products or services online.

For an existing company or for one you create, make the assumption you have a budget sufficient to recommend whatever marketing programs you deem appropriate to reaching your target audience.

Remember that a Marketing Plan is not a business plan. You do not need to explain how to create a company or an E-commerce website. You do not to raise capital or make sales projections. Instead, assume you have a functioning E-commerce site that requires an annual Marketing Plan to sustain your existing business and to expand for the future.

The E-Commerce Marketing Plan

The main focus of this plan is to describe how you will market your E-commerce business to prospects and to customers. While certain principles apply to all E-commerce marketing, tailor your marketing plan to your unique target audience. For example, you would use different online marketing techniques to reach college students than you would to reach older adults preparing for retirement. Your Marketing Plan should provide specific examples of how you can reach your target audience, by describing techniques you can use to achieve these key strategic objectives:

· Reach and acquire new customers

· Provide superior service to existing customers

· Encourage regular site visits and additional sales

· Measure the results of your marketing programs

· Brand your company

Explain how your company might use many of these or other specific online marketing techniques in order to accomplish the key objectives listed above:

· Search Engine Optimization

· Paid Keyword Search Marketing

· Affiliate Marketing

· Reciprocal Links

· Email Marketing

· Online Advertising

· Social Networking

· Blogs

· Widgets

Proposed E-Commerce Marketing Plan Outline:

While the contents of an E-commerce Marketing Plan are unique to each company, here is the suggested outlinefor your Course Project. Your outline might differ slightly depending on your chosen company but should cover these key areas (The %'s by each one show the relative importance of each section.):

1. Executive Summary - a brief description of your eBusiness with a short summary of your marketing niche and Unique Selling Proposition.

2. Market Summary/Target Audience(s) - a description of the main market you serve and the details of the target markets that you plan to reach (demographics, psychographics, lifestyles, unique characteristics, trends, etc.)

3. Competition - a detailed summary of who your chief competitors are, what type of web sites they maintain, and how your strategy will position your company and its products/services against them.

4. Specific Marketing Strategies - the heart of your plan, showing how you will use specific online marketing techniques (as noted above) to successfully market your E-Commerce business.

5. Measuring Success - what are the specific criteria you will use to measure the results and success of your E-Commerce Marketing plan - such as clickthroughs on certain pages, online transactions, number of email addresses captured each day, etc.

6. Summary - finally, your plan should incorporate a wrap-up of your ideas by summarizing key thoughts, goals, strategy and implementation. How you plan to meet timing objectives should also be summarized at this time. Also, recommendations as to future enhancements and additions can be part of this last section.