The Complete Cook Book

Build Your Online Marketing Plan

SimilarGroup © 2009-2014. All Rights Reserved

Why Are We Sharing Our Marketing Plan?

SimilarWeb prides itself for being a Digital Insight Platform for the

online marketing community.

As such, we strive to give not only traffic statistics for any

website, but also the required tools for navigating through the

confusing world of online marketing.

We find ourselves in an interesting place where we’re both

the providers and our own clients. That's one of the reasons we understand our users and their needs.

Why Are We Sharing Our Marketing Plan?

One such need is a "cookbook" for baking your online marketing

strategy.

As with most recipes, everybody likes something slightly different

so you should use the base and change the toppings to suit your

needs.

We've used real examples of what we went through to try and put

everything in context.

The Cook Book Principles

Stage 1 – The Basics:

• Measurement

• Discovering the unique uses of your product

• Finding the main target audiences

• Finding main target markets

• Building the conversion funnel

• Setting up the billing system

The Basics

1STAGE

Analytics is the heart of any online business. Without it you’re blind to any marketing action you take.

Most people use Google Analytics and there are more advanced tools like Adobe and Coremetrics (by

IBM). There has also been a new movement towards BI (Business Intelligence) as it enables you to

track the individual journeys of users onsite as opposed to Analytics which only provides aggregations.

In SimilarWeb we’ve tested several options, but ultimately recommend these two:• Piwik – open source site’s analytics• Google Analytics

* For event tracking - MixPanel is a platform that specializes in such solutions.

Main Tip: Use more than one system, so you always have a backup in case one fails!

Discovering The Unique Uses of Your Product

1STAGE

To find out who uses SimilarWeb PRO, we got in touch with our clients and interviewed them about

it. We also sent out an email asking our clients to rank the latest updates we’ve added to our

platform. The results helped us prioritize the following updates we’ve made.

Some of the main uses we came up with after asking our clients were:

• Affiliate managers looking for new affiliates

• Media buyers trying to determine where to spend their display ads budget

• SEO and PPC campaign managers looking for new keywords

• Product managers who are in the stages of industry research and competitive analysis

Main Tip: Don’t hesitate to ask your users what they like best about your product!

Finding The Main Target Audiences

1STAGE

• Talk with your existing clients and get to know them

• Guide your sales team to be attentive to characterizations and needs of clients and

potential clients

• Get your Product team to shadow you sales and client services team to gain a better

understanding of what goes on

At SimilarWeb we’ve identified several types of audiences who use, or can use, our platform.

However, we’ve chosen one audience to concentrate our initial efforts on – online marketing

professionals

Main Tip: Focus, Focus, Focus! The way to take over the world is with one target audience at a time!

Finding Main Target Markets

1STAGE

• Research your competitors – find their strong and weak points. You might decide to

go with markets you know are working well for them, but will probably prove very

competitive. Or you may take a chance with untouched markets, which you don’t know

for sure will work, but might hold less competition.

At SimilarWeb we used our own platform – SimilarWeb PRO, for researching our

competitors and finding markets we want to focus on. This helped us to single out the markets

with the biggest potential and least competition.

Main Tip: Starting with few markets gives you better allocation of resources and minimizes error costs!

Building The Conversion Funnel

1STAGE

When building a conversion funnel you need to consider which stages must be included:

On one hand, you want to give the user enough information about the product in order for

them to feel comfortable purchasing it. On the other hand, you don’t want to

overcomplicate the purchase funnel and cause a high desertion rate.

Main Tip: Using A/B testing here will help you come up with the most optimized

funnel!

Building The Conversion Funnel

1STAGE

Conversion rate expert – a consultancy company for building conversion funnels. If you’re not sure

about the direction to take here, contact experts to either consult you or give tailored solutions.

At SimilarWeb we’re constantly testing different conversion funnels, gathering statistics and

collecting users’ feedback. One example of a great result from these tests was moving from a 24

hours trial (which required a credit card), to a free demo on SimilarWeb PRO.

We got amazing feedback from our users and a significant improvement in our conversion

rate.

Main Tip: Register to the conversion rate expert newsletter. It provides a wealth of case studies for free!

Setting Up The Billing System

1STAGE

Choosing a billing management platform – it’s crucial to know which target markets you’re

aiming at. Each of the platforms out there specializes in specific countries and has issues with

others.

At SimilarWeb we started with one company that didn’t work well for our target markets and

caused us to lose some key transactions. We eventually moved to Recurly. The move was

painful and costly, but in the long run it was worth it.

Main Tip: Make sure your chosen billing system offers support to your target markets before starting to work with them!

The Cook Book Principles

Stage 2 – Actions Items:

• Identifying goals

• Choosing the main message

• Choosing the right KPIs

• Choosing marketing channels

• Timetable and resources allocation

Identify Goals

Create Awareness

Increase Traffic

Improve Conversion Flow

Increase Subscriptions

Increase Stickiness

2STAGE

Identifying goals can vary between different businesses.

However, there are some goals which you’ll

find in most.

Here are the basic goals for a business

in its first stages:

Choosing The Main Message

Our main marketing message is what we want people to think of first when considering our service or

product.

This message will guide us throughout our marketing strategy, especially in the first awareness stage.

The message doesn’t have to be set in stone – you can start with one and switch to another at a later

stage. At SimilarWeb we started with ‘Love Your Competitors!’ and later switched to:

Digital Insights for the Online Marketing Community

2STAGE

Main Tip: As you move forward with building your brand, your main message might change!

Choosing The Right KPIs

KPIs – Key performance indicators are your tool for checking your success or failure in

reaching your set goals. For example, KPIs for SEO might be – organic and direct traffic, ranks

in SERP, number of 404 errors. PPC KPIs might be CPC rate, CTR percentage, conversion rate.

At SimilarWeb we constantly check our KPIs to measure progress. We sometimes update

them according to our gathered BI.

2STAGE

Main Tip: Beware of vanity KPIs. If a KPI doesn't directly help you make a decision, you shouldn't be using it.

Choosing Marketing Channels

When you’re trying to decide the best way to allocate your quarterly marketing budget, your

decisions must be based on educated guesses. These guesses are based upon your own BI or

Competitive intelligence. We’ve already talked about personal BI, so we’ll focus here on

competitive BI.

There are many tools for online competitive intelligence. We’ve included a map here of the

main ones, plus their core functions and uses.

2STAGE

Potential Resources for Research

Similarweb.com• Competitors

Website

Traffic

Analytics

• Referring

Domains

• Referring

Keywords

• Industry

Analysis

• Top Websites

• Similar Sites

MajesticSEO

• Research

Incoming

Links

• Check

Majestic Trust

And Citation

flows

Google Tools

• Google

Keyword

Planner

• Google Trends

• Google

Analytics

• Google

Webmaster

Tools

SERP

• Search

Engine

Results

Page -

Organic And

Paid Results

Choosing Marketing Channels

After researching your own analytics and your competitors’ traffic statistics, you need to make

your decision. There are so many online marketing channels, with new ones appearing every

few months, it’s hard to keep track of all the options out there.

We’ve included a comprehensive map with the main online marketing channels and their

formats.

2STAGE

Choosing Marketing Channels

Content

Marketing• Blog Posts• Guest Blog Posts• E-books• Email Newsletters

• Slideshows• Podcasts• Standard Videos• Micro-videos (i.e., Vine)

• Social Media Posts

• Webinars• White Papers• Press Releases• Content Sharing Hubs

PPC/CPM

Accounts• Google AdWords

• Bing Ads

• Social Media –

FB, Twitter,

Reddit,

Stumbleupon,

LinkedIn, etc.

• Display Ads

Viral Marketing

• Approaching

Opinion Leaders

• Forums – Paid

And Free Listings

• Organic Social

Marketing (FB,

Twitter, G+,

LinkedIn, etc.)

Affiliates

• Hand Picking

Through:

• Search Engine

Results Page -

Organic And

Paid Results

• SimilarWeb PRO

- Referral Traffic

Section

• Affiliate

Management

Programs

Email Marketing

• Blog Newsletter

• Product Updates

• Special Offers

• Engagement

Follow Up Emails

Timetable and Resources Allocation

While choosing between different optional online marketing channels; you need to take into account the followings.

• Time cost/potential value - value should be defined according to collected BI stats

• Expenses/potential revenue – should be defined according to Competitors’ BI or personal previous experience

• Tech resources

• Goals priority

• Current status of brand/product visibility

*It’s important to frame each marketing channel within a specific time frame with goals and KPIs per channels

2STAGE

Main Tip: If none of your goals and KPIs fit a marketing channel, it’s the not right one for you!

Online Marketing Strategy Ready

Time to start working..!

Appreciate Your Time!

SimilarWeb is part of SimilarGroup,a global leader in finding and interpreting digital information.

Digital Insights for the Online Marketing Community

SimilarGroup © 2009-2014. All Rights Reserved