Web Marketing Campaign or Related Project?
Your satisfaction with COIN 72 will be expressed through your choice of project -- there is a wide range of choices! You can emphasize either a Web marketing campaign/initiative/strategy for a particular website business, or develop your own e-commerce/e-marketing (customer communications/relations online), or collaboratively create an alternative (talk with Mimi!). Please decide which of these tracks you wish to pursue, and start early to give yourself enough time to research & to prepare.
Please submit an integrated e-business and Web marketing plan, showing how you'll use marketing strategy/tactics/tech tools to accomplish business goals. The key to a successful business plan, is how credible your description is, which builds on how achievable your marketing and sales targets are. While you may not have a lot of experience with this, start SOMEWHERE, now!
Your project will reflect textbook, supplementary reference, and outside real-world activity resources to help you build your case -- you can even interview people to get their ideas. Most of you will propose some activity to be done at your Website (midquarter) and then go ahead and implement it and gather statistics on how it worked, what the results were, what you learned, etc.
Take initiative and put your heart into it and try to talk with people from the "real world" who've done some of this before and can give you good suggestions! Go and attend meetings (such as Direct Marketing Association of NCalif) and SCORE workshops (online short courses and live) and find out what works.
Your finished product will be a paper and presentation (summarized posting in the Discussions, which you will lead with some questions for discussion and addressing questions your Classmates ask you!). You may even involve classmates in one of your sample campaigns using PM (not real e-mail) -- contact Mimi for details.
An executive summary of your plan is a 2-page focused description of your e-biz/Web Marketing initiative (condensed from the multipage e-biz plan mentioned above), stating the mission of the organization you are working for, the target industry you are in, the unique value you will provide, and your product sales or other goals. Describe what your marketing and sales strategy will be, and how you plan to accomplish those goals, including funds/resources (use a spreadsheet), and general approach to tactics/techniques/tools.
Your marketing strategy and tactics are designed to accomplish the strategic goals of the business plan. You need to have developed a marketing campaign to achieve a particular goal. This will consist of a description of goals, strategies, and processes and a time line for what will be accomplished each week for the next 3 months from now and beyond. The metrics (measurable outcomes/statistics gathered on success/flops) used in these programs can be sales oriented, market share focused, or donations if you are a non-profit organization -- these are hard numbers that are countable (not just the amount of traffic your website is receiving) that show your business goals, and numerically, how your marketing and sales plan will get you there There are alternatives to this Web Marketing initiative/campaign project, so please contact Mimi for some brainstorming. Your project will be around 2,000 words showing what you learned/applied during this course, and how you plan to continue with your Web marketing after the class is over.
If you have not taken COIN 56 E-Biz and written a business plan before, please review the E-business plan outline in Modules and look at several sample (free!) business plans at: http://www.bplans.com/
This a sample of an e-business plan, which includes a section on MARKETING (you can do a little improvising as well!)
Option A. E-Business Plan. Write a paragraph or more on:
1. Cover page (identification & purpose of report)
2. Executive summary (1 page: highlights of your Project Report, no longer than 10% of your report).
3. Intro: Description of firm and specifics of the Products and/or Services to be offered: How will they be developed?
4. The Industry & Competition: What companies/products is the proposed business going to compete with? What is the competitive advantage of the proposal? What are external forces involved such as globalization, sociocultural, economic, intermediary & suppliers, technological, political, legal, etc.)
5. e-Business Model description and anticipated revenue streams
6. Management Team/Org Issues - who, experience, functions, etc.; organizational structure; who will do what specific work; how the organization's communications structure will function(you can use PERT/Gantt charts to illustrate)
7. Marketing & sales plan, advertising & promotion plans; how customer service will be provided and what it will "look" like; is there a need for market research? How will it be done? (who are the targeted customers, what is known about their behavior, how will the marketing mix be modified, etc.) This is the part you will focus on in COIN 72 and beef up!
8. Operations: How the business will be run; what operations will be done in-house and what will be outsourced
9. Technology Analysis: What technology is necessary and how is it going to be obtained? hardware/software/networking/e-commerce applications, etc.
10. Finance (3-5 year projection using pro forma income statement, balance sheet, and cashflow analysis; calculation of breakeven costs; other financial projections) - revenue generation model, cash flow, cost of financing, anything to do with money, etc.
11. Risk Analysis: How risky is the venture? To whom? What are the contingencies? What are exit strategies?
12. Conclusion: Include suggested action by individuals or a timeline for acting upon recommendations made in your report (can use PERT/Gantt charts or project management graphs)
13. Appendix: Include any useful supplementary info (e.g., questionnaire to gather research data, full reference citations on researched material, etc.
PAPER LENGTH = 2,000 words minimum (4-5 pages), spell checked, with specific examples
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Some resources to see sample business plans (they don't all "look the same") online include:
MyOwnBusiness - //www.myownbusiness.org/s2/ (copy/paste URL into a new browser window)
bplans.com - //www.bplans.com/sample_business_plans/index.cfm
Business Plans.org - //www.businessplans.org/businessplans.html
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Option B. Generic E-Marketing Implementation Plan (this means you or a friend already HAVE a small business and need to put it ONLINE as well as USE WEB MARKETING, whether you collect money there or not). Write a paragraph or more on each of these:
1. Cover page (identification & purpose of report)
2. Intro: Description of firm and its function
3. Objectives (derived from the initiative's overall goals and including planned benefits/costs in measurable terms, such as dollars or quantities; calculate ROI & other quantitative analysis)
4. Outsourcing: How much of the project & to whom (form internal teams comprised of knowledgeable individuals. from within the company; they develop project objectives & take responsibility, designing an outsourcing strategy, selecting hosting service (or do-it-yourself in house), and supervising staffing of the project).
5. Examples: Try to interview people who have done this before, to get hints/tips -- go "beyond the book"!
6. Show Project Mgt (formal way to plan/control tasks/resources so as to make informed trade-offs re: schedule, cost & performance). Use tools like Excel, PERT/Gantt charts, project portfolio mgt. for multiple ongoing projects, other software.
7. Staffing the E-Com Initiative: Show what's needed (i.e., bus. mgt, applic. specialists, cust. service staff, syst. admins, network operations staff & database admins).
8. Post-implementation Audit: Describe how you will conduct this, comparing objectives to actual results
9. Appendix: Any useful supplementary info (e.g., Website, surveys/results, interviews)
10. Exec Summary Recap of your Project highlights (no longer than 10% of your report), to also be included in FORUMS for discussion.
**Reference: Gary Schneider's supplementary book, Electronic Commerce: 6th Annual Edition, 2009, Thompson/Course Technology, ISBN 0-619-21704-9 is very helpful for this (or newer, similar books).
PAPER LENGTH = 2,000 words minimum (4-5 pages), spell checked, with examples
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Before a Marketing Plan or Web Marketing Implementation Plan is written, research and discussion among team participants (or interviews with outside resources) should focus on the following questions:
* What is the fundamental purpose and nature of the e-business/e-commerce strategy being designed?
* What are the basic business model and revenue streams going to be?
* What are the industry-level forces at work that are affecting customers, suppliers, and competitors?
* How will the plan create a sustainable competitive advantage for the firm?
* Who are our target customers and what do we know about their behavior both online and off?
* How much time & money is this plan going to require?
* Who will do the required work, and when?
* How will management implement, monitor, and control efforts to achieve the plan's objectives?
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Due Date: End of Wk 10
Your paper may be 4 or more single-spaced pages long and submitted as a Report (in Word) to Mimi in ASSIGNMENTS with a posted summary as an interactive Teach-In in CLASSROOM DISCUSSIONS by deadline (check Syllabus & Assignments). to share with others/receive feedback. Remember that although you don't have to "reveal all your secrets," you need to include enough, including some questions for discussion, so that we can participate and give you feedback and other ideas!
Make it real -- it'll be FUN & you'll put into practice what you've learned in COIN 72. It could be the start of a whole new business online!
How do we start researching our competition once we've decided what kind of eBiz we'd like to have? For starters, check out E-Commerce Times (//www.ecommercetimes.com) and EMarketer (//www.emarketer.com), which summarize trends and point you to more lengthy (and expensive) research done by reputable search companies, like Forrester (//www.forrester.com), which combines the consulting services it offers thru Giga Information Group (//www.gigaweb.com) with its reports, which are distributed online through the infomediary e-biz model.
(updated 12/11) |