Any business can put together a successful Web-based marketing plan if they take the time to define the six critical elements of a Web-marketing campaign:

1. Marketing Purpose

2. Marketing Objectives

3. Presentation Vehicle

4. Information Format

5. Marketing Venue

6. Achievable Expectations

1. Marketing Purpose

Marketing is all about building a brand personality that relates to an interested audience of either business-to-consumer or business-to-business prospects. Prospects search-out brands that help them construct and maintain their own self-image or at least an image that they aspire to, an image that they are comfortable communicating to others. The purchase, for example, of a Macintosh computer says as much about who bought it, as it does about that person's computing requirements.

"Thus, while the psychological/emotional need is to construct, reconstruct, and maintain the self-identity, the socio-cultural need is to communicate to others the self-identity." -Ouwersloot & Tudorica, 'Brand Personality Propositions'.

Accepting the need to build a brand personality that legitimate prospects can relate to might very well mean rethinking exactly who you are as a company and exactly what you are offering on both a psychological, emotional and socio-cultural level.

Most companies have a well-defined list of functional benefits that they provide clients; but what you have to ask yourself is, what psychological, emotional, and socio-cultural benefits do you offer and are they represented by your corporate image or brand personality? And if you think this only applies to consumer product companies, you are mistaken. Every company from industrial widget suppliers to packaged goods manufacturers needs to define their personality in terms of the emotive benefits they provide.

2. Marketing Objectives

One of the most difficult things for small companies to accept is that sales are the result of establishing an appropriate marketing framework. Once you recognize that the real purpose of marketing is to create a relationship with your audience based on an emotional connection in the form of a brand personality, you are ready for the next step: defining your marketing objectives.

Successful marketing campaigns rely on strategies and tactics that grow out of defining eight important marketing objectives.

Awareness: objective one is to make your market audience aware of your existence, but name recognition alone won't bring in the orders.