10 Essential Elements for Your Online Marketing Plan
by Kevin P. Richardson, President, MedRocket, Inc.

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About the Author - Kevin Richardson is a healthcare marketing consultant, executive coach, and writer who provides fresh perspectives and expertise about online healthcare marketing. Sign up for his FREE "MedRocket Ezine" newsletter and discover how to profitably attract and serve healthcare consumers online. Subscribe at http://www.medrocket.com.

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Outwit. Outplay. Outlast. Surely you recognize the credo of CBS' smash-hit "Survivor" TV series, even if you're not one of the show's aficionados.

Healthcare marketers usually don't think of their marketing efforts in such competitive terms. Yet whether you're creating a successful online marketing plan or a winning strategy for "Survivor" you'll need to assess your strengths, weaknesses, and capabilities, critically size up your competitors, and carefully strategize to determine the most effective game plan.

In past articles, we've used several tools to evaluate an organization's strengths in technology infrastructure, traditional and Internet marketing initiatives, database tactics, and consumer relationship development activities. We also determined where your Internet marketing efforts were concentrated and identified the areas that may require further development. (These tools are listed at the end of this article.)

Now, we'll begin creating an integrated online marketing plan that you can customize according to your organization's strategic objectives, capabilities, strengths, resources, and traditional marketing efforts.

Set Your Watches for the Online Marketing Time Zone

Online marketing is by nature, fast and furious -- but shouldn't be quick and dirty. Unlike traditional marketing planning that may take six months to a year, I advise health organizations to target a much briefer window. Instead of months and years, we're now talking weeks and months -- and sometimes days and weeks. Still, we need to plan adequately for online success.

If you're a veteran of traditional marketing, then the transition to the online marketing mindset and time zone may take some getting used to. This paradigm change also happened in the mid 1980's when marketers were first exposed to the power of desktop publishing to compress the print production cycle. Then, what took months suddenly took weeks to produce. We were amazed.

Enter the Internet. Here we go again. What used to take weeks now takes days to implement online. And we can change the online email or Web-based campaign we're running in a matter of hours. That's a good reason not to try and plan your online marketing for 12 months, but to focus on a much briefer period -- three to six months -- to optimally integrate the Net into your traditional marketing.

So, how do we develop an online marketing plan?

The power of the Internet as a marketing channel comes from marketing integration. Leverage the Internet through your existing marketing program. If your organization is just beginning to use the Net for marketing, or even if you're not exactly a Net marketing "newbie", the planning process is more intuitive if you plug right in to your ongoing marketing initiatives.

Starting off with Internet marketing, I recommend that you select a few marketing efforts from your annual marketing plan. Then, hold a mindstorming session with a small group of cyber-savvy members from your marketing, public relations, customer service, and information systems departments. Getting others involved in the session is vital to developing a company-wide e-business mentality.

Make sure everyone is up to speed on your main marketing themes before you start mindstorming. Come up with a list of potential marketing areas that could be implemented online or supplemented with online activities. Pick a few of the most promising ideas to explore further and develop into a series of online marketing initiatives. The next section outlines the major areas of an online marketing plan.

The Shape of Things to Come

Online marketing planning needs to be succinct and targeted. The basic foundation for your online marketing plan has 10 major areas that need to be addressed:

1. Goal
2. Objective
3. Target Audiences
4. Marketing Integration
5. Strategy
6. Tactics
7. Logistics
8. Metrics
9. Budget
10. Timeline

You don't need to use these headings or this order. Move them around as you see fit. However, the information for each of the areas should be included for completeness. If you like, you can add other areas such as competitor analyses.

However, I'd keep detailed information like this to a minimum if you do include it. It's probably already in your traditional marketing plan and duplicating it makes little sense unless you're trying to impress someone with the sheer heft of your marketing plan. (We used to jokingly refer to this as "passing the weight test" for a business plan.)

Now Put Pencil to Paper

Your online marketing plan should actually be a series of discrete documents, each covering a single marketing objective/tactic, rather than a single huge document. This is quite similar in approach to preparing a creative brief for a collateral piece or print advertisement. These smaller plans can be incorporated into your primary marketing plan as an addendum, since we're seeking an integrated marketing program, right?

Remember that your online marketing plan is a working, dynamic document that should be adjusted as necessary to respond to new needs and the latest metrics data.

In greater detail, here are the 10 plan areas:

Goal
We'll begin by defining our overall goal for the online initiative.
What do we want to do online? Do you want to build brand awareness? Demonstrate or sell health products or services? Build stronger relationships? Provide health education and information? Conduct public relations activities? Enhance consumer research? Or increase your customer service and support functions?

Objectives
The next thing we must do is to identify our objectives that address the goal. Objectives must be measurable. Otherwise, how do you determine your success?

For example, let's say you wanted to define an objective for generating leads for a pain management program. You're planning to run print ads in newspapers in your service area. You'd like to encourage people to visit your Web site and take an online quiz about chronic pain. When they receive their results it asks them if they'd like more information on the pain center.

Our objective might then be:
Generate 35 leads for the chronic pain program through the interactive chronic pain quiz.

You can have multiple objectives for each initiative. For example, you might also want to set an objective that quantifies the number of online leads gathered in response to the print campaign for the pain center. Do this for each of the marketing areas for which you want to use the Internet as a marketing tool.

Target Audiences
No surprise here. You need to specify whom you're targeting for this online initiative. It will probably be the same audience segment that you're addressing for the traditional media portion of your marketing. However, it may not be. You could be trying to attract media, human resources directors of area businesses, or some other relevant audience segment.

Marketing Integration
Briefly outline the elements of your traditional marketing with which you will integrate your online marketing program. It could be a single ad run repetitively for a month, or a multiple media campaign in multiple markets run for flights of three or more months.

No need to insert the entire creative brief for the traditional campaign, but be sure to capture the highlights of media selection and placement, scheduling overview, message platform, creative approach, etc. It should be enough to give someone a synopsis of the traditional marketing activities your plugging into.

Strategy
Outline your strategy for the given goal, objective, audience target, and marketing integration. This will tie in closely with the tactics outlined in the next section. Develop your special online offer and include it here. What type of creative execution will you use for your online marketing? Will it be graphically cut from the same cloth as your related collateral and print ads? Or will it diverge in some way? How?

Tactics
In this section you'll go into some detail about the chosen tactics. What content are you going to develop? How are you going to make the content available (web, email, download, newsletter)?

It will be helpful for this section to review your results from using the Ramp Up Assessment tool and Ramp Up Visualizer tool to analyze your current online marketing capabilities and approximate stage on the Internet marketing adoption continuum.

Evaluate where your health organization's online capabilities lay on the continuum. At what stage are your efforts? If you're working at the Advanced Interactive Stage, then seek to incorporate tactics that call for increased database connectivity and online one-to-one marketing capabilities.

For some examples of online tactics and their requirements for execution, take a look at the Online Health Marketing Tactical Grid .

Logistics
Here's where we discuss the nitty-gritty of the implementation and execution of the tactics. How will we do it? What are the technical requirements? Do we have the database capabilities to implement the tactic? If not, how can we acquire it?

Do we have the staffing, capabilities, and competencies for this tactic? If not, how will we address any shortcomings? Will we require external consultants, service bureaus, or developers? Who will handle emails that result from the campaign? How quickly can we respond?

Metrics
Determining the success of your online marketing efforts can be easier to quantify than other types of marketing activities. Since most of the logging of information can be automated by your servers, it becomes a matter of determining what you want to track for metrics, implementing the necessary mechanism, and then collecting and analyzing the results. What measurement criteria will you use to determine the success of your tactics? What do you need to do to prepare to gather this data?

Budget
Provide an overview of the various costs associated with implementing this online marketing initiative. Be sure to include creative costs for reworking print and broadcast materials, costs to develop original online content or license content for use, fees for external developers, programmers, and consultants, and costs related to the execution of the tactic (e.g., service bureau fees, database services, list cleaning, etc.).

Timeline
Remember that you're working in the Internet marketing time zone. Internet time doesn't wait. What is your development and implementation timeframe? Sure, you'd like to have two months to plan and execute. Can you do it in half that time? What would it take to do it in a quarter of the time? Think about the cost-benefit tradeoffs of doing what it takes to be there first.

Even once you're up and running with the online campaign, you'll also need to plan for quick changes in response to your analyses of new data for various aspects of the campaign. Set up specific dates to serve as milestones. These include dates for content creation, database modifications, beta testing, campaign launch, etc.

Creating a Bird's-Eye View

Whether you have two plans or 20, I've found it helpful to somehow aggregate the information from your plans to create an overall planning view for budget resources, staffing, technical requirements, scheduling, and other requirements.

One way to approach this is to use a spreadsheet to create a summary grid with nine column headings. These are a little different from the plan sections. In parentheses, I have placed some possible entries for the cells beneath the headlines to give you a better idea.

1. Goal (e.g. generate direct response)
2. Objective
3. Audience (e.g. consumers)
4. Tactic (e.g. email newsletter)
5. Integration (e.g. pain management center print campaign)
6. Technical Requirements (e.g. broadcast email capability)
7. Staffing (e.g. content writer)
8. Consulting (e.g. email broadcast knowledge, programming)
9. Schedule (e.g. monthly)
10. Budget

In this way you'll have access to a birds-eye view of your online marketing efforts without having to flip through numerous online marketing plans. You'll also be able to easily sum the budget amounts. This summary sheet can be included in your primary marketing document with a footnote to the complete documents in the addendum.

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