Understand

This is undoubtedly one of the most important factors, if not the most important one. A business which fails to recognize the needs (or requirements) of its customers is bound to fail eventually.

Understanding includes clearly knowing:

• Your business goals
• Your customers behavior
• Your customers' likes and dislikes.

These three things play a crucial role in helping a business grow and achieve success.

Planning

Once a clear understanding of various business aspects is achieved, it becomes clear what actions needs to be taken in achieve the desired results.
We create a plan which decides how to utilize these web assets and what activities must be done. The list of web assets includes:

• Website
• Blog
• Online Community
• Forums
• Social Media presence

Consider a photography business that is planning to create awareness and get new customers through internet.

There are multiples ways of achieving this goal. It can either simply create a website or just have its own social media account or both. If there is already a website or accounts on social media, a plan can be drafted which can effectively utilize them.

We can also choose a suitable promotion platform where the target customers are going. Besides, what kind of content is to be shared and how often is determined.

In short, each and every activity that needs to be done to achieve the goal is drafted at this stage.

Execution

This is the stage where the plan is actually implemented. Enlisted below are some of the activities that are part of this stage:

• Creating a website
• Creating a blog
• Creating Social Media accounts
• Establishing and expanding online connections
• Utilizing channels (not mentioned above) for reaching target audience.

Whatever actions have been drafted in the "Planning" stage, they are executed as per defined methods or process.

Measure

The "Measure" stage is where businesses can see the actual impact of all three previous stages (understanding, planning and execution) is measured. Using various measurement tools, we can clearly identify what is working and what isn't.

Businesses can measure key performance indicators (KPIs) such as:

• How much traffic is coming to various online assets
• What type of people is visiting them?
• What is bringing traffic to your web assets?
• What is helping in generating sales?
• What is not helping in generating sales?

Retain or Re-frame

Based on the outcome of the "Measure" stage, businesses can decide to either retain the plan (due to its success) or re-frame the plan (due to failure in achieving the business goal).