Week Three

Champaign Budget/Campaign Duration

As mentioned in my goals and objectives, my main objective is to increase sales. Since my business is an online retailer, I will focus most of my advertising and marketing through the Internet. I have planned to spend an average of $500 a month for the first year, then gradually increase promotional spending with the increase of sales and popularity of the brand. This will be a common theme with my business structure.

Search Engine Optimization: I believe this is a vital step in the success of my company. We plan on spending 20% of our monthly budget and man-hours on developing our S.E.O. This will ensure we are easily found organically through search engines.

Paid Search or Pay-Per-Click: P.P.C. advertising is a great way to advertise, especially with sites such as Google AdSense or even utilizing Social media P.P.C. such as Facebook. We will spend 20% of our monthly budget and man-hours on P.P.C. advertising.

Promotion/PR: This is a great way to promote your product. We plan to take a non-traditional approach to our promotions. We plan on sponsoring bands, skaters, and other influential people. Since we are supporting non-profits organizations and important causes, we believe people would want to be involved in our movement. Since we would be promoting through sponsorships we would just need to cover our expenses of cost of goods sold and shipping and handling. We believe we can cover this with about 20% of our monthly budget and man-hours.

Digital Advertising: Although digital advertising does have its positives we have decided to decline any advancement towards the channel. It is a costly and rarely effective means of advertising. Through years and years of digital advertising, many of the online community have learned to ignore these adds, in a phenomenon called banner blindness.

Social Media and Viral Marketing: we have decided to spend the largest percentage of our marketing budget on social media and viral marketing. Since our demographics are females from 18-34 years old With an annual income of 75-100k, we have found that social media (Facebook) the number one most popular sites for our demographic. Therefore, we plan on spending 30% of our marketing budget and man-hours.

Email: Email is another channel we would like to utilize. Through our various websites we plan on offering the option to join our mailing list. This will give our customers the opportunity to view new products and special promotions. We plan on spending 10% of our total marketing budget and man-hours creating our email advertisements.

Affiliate Marketing: This is a great way to market if you have the demand and budget to support this channel. Currently I do not see enough incentive to utilize this channel.