8 Steps To Creating A Digital Marketing Plan
The days where paper advertisements and billboards were the best methods of promoting your products and services are long gone. Now, you must have a digital marketing strategy in place if you want your company to continue growing in the 21st century.
However, before you go ahead with creating a digital marketing plan, you need to think about what you want to achieve with it. Here are a few questions you could ask yourself:
✨ What results are you expecting to achieve?
✨ In what way will you achieve these results?
✨ By what means do you measure the results?
✨ What tools are needed?
For example, if the objective of your digital marketing plan is to initiate more leads via social media, you can run a campaign on Instagram. You can share some of your best-performing content on Instagram to gain awareness and increase conversion rate through the channel.
From the techniques to personas to the right tools, digital marketing comes with a lot of choices and can be difficult trying to figure out the first step to take.
In this post, we’re sharing with you the steps to creating a digital marketing plan from scratch that’ll help you realize your business-specific goals and objectives.
1. Identify Your Goals and Objectives
Marketing goals should always be in tandem with the fundamental goals of your business, so, Before embarking on a campaign, every digital marketer should know what they want their digital marketing campaigns to accomplish, be it building name brand recognition, leads generation, sales, or email subscribers.
Without these set goals, the strategy will fail, so defining them is paramount. Be sure that the objectives developed are suitable and measurable.
One of the most popular methods of goal setting is S.M.A.R.T. This acronym means setting goals that are
- Specific: The objectives must be detailed. It should answer the basic questions of what, who, where, when, how, and why.
- Measurable: If the objective cannot be accurately measured, it will be difficult to know if it has been accomplished. Therefore, you should think about what KPIs you will use and how the success will be defined
- Attainable: Goals should be streamlined and not broad.
- Relevant: It should take into consideration our past resources and achievements.
- Timely: Set a deadline for your goal and establish a time frame to see if it has been done or not and why. It will help to divide a global goal into lesser objectives, to correct the course as time goes on.
Most goal-setting methods are going to encourage setting objectives that meet these same criteria.
2. Define Your Customer Persona
Irrespective of the marketing strategy to be used — digital or not — it’s imperative to know who your target audience is. An effective digital marketing campaign can’t be created without knowing who you’re trying to reach.
Customer personas are fictional representatives of people with the traits of the target audience you’re aiming at patronizing your products or services. They personify your ideal customer and who is most likely to purchase from your business and can be created by researching, surveying, and interviewing your business’s target audience. Digital marketers amass qualitative and quantitative information about the target audience such as gender, age, hobbies, location, etc. However, the potential customer has been taken to another level recently, with buyer personas taking over the definitions.
To create your buyer persona, the following information should be collected:
- Location
- Age
- Income
- Job title
- Religion
- Hobbies and interests
- Goals
Designing a customer persona can help you in creating your digital marketing plan as this directs you on how to best target people in your audience.
3. Set Your Budget
Budget is an integral part of your campaign. Knowing how much you can spend on your digital marketing campaign before implementing your strategy is very important. Fixing a marketing budget gives you a step ahead in allocating your spending to the services needed.
When you set a budget, it helps in simplifying and allocating financials to various channels. Striking a balance between how much you want to spend and how much investment is needed is key in achieving valuable results.
For example, you may think that $400 is adequate to run a Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign, and while it’ll drive some results, it won’t produce the same kind of results as a person who invests $1000 into the same kind of campaign.
You will build a stronger digital marketing strategy if you understand how much is available at your disposal and how much you need to invest in each channel.
4. Understand Your Customers Journey
Another significant digital marketing concept that you need to consider before actually developing your plan is the digital sales funnel. It is made up of several different phases that consumers go through before they get to the point of buying, or being long-term customers.
The phases can vary in number and their exact name, depending on who you ask, but they usually include the following:
Trigger & Awareness: This is the stage where people hear of your brand or product for the very first time.
Consideration: At this stage, name-brand recognition has been established, and the user is willing to look into your products or services to learn more. They may also research your competitors at this stage.
Conversion: Users are willing to become customers and purchase from you at this point.
Delight & Advocate: Repeat clients may become loyal to your brand and eventually may become advocates for your brand.
A person at the Trigger & Awareness stage is not going to respond in the same way as someone who is at the Delight & Advocate stage. They are going to interact with your brand in different ways and on different platforms, and your digital marketing strategy will need to be tailored to keep that in mind.
5. Audit the Internal and External Factors of Your Business
The first thing you need to do when developing your digital marketing plan is to carry out an internal and external (i.e political, economic variations, and, employee productivity) analysis of your industry. A useful framework for this is the SWOT analysis that allows you to look at the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats for your company and the market at large.
You must be familiar with the industry you operate in, the needs of your customers, how and where they are addressed. This analysis is qualitative as well as quantitative because it looks at factors such as customers’ digital habits, intermediaries, influencers, and more.
The idea to adopt here is to examine each of them and implement benchmarking techniques that aim at identifying the best digital practices and case studies. When this is down, applying them to the business is an increasingly prominent part of the overall corporate strategy.
6. Implement a Roadmap for Achieving Your Digital Marketing Goals
You’ve done the planning and the research, and you now have a solid vision of the elements that will make up your digital marketing strategy. This means that your marketing strategy should map out the series of actions you need to take to achieve your goals, based on your research up to this point.
This begins with choosing the most appropriate channels for brand awareness and customer engagement. Your goals play a part in influencing the methodology you will adopt. If the focus is simply to promote a product and achieve the highest possible reach, investing in paid advertising may be the solution.
For instance, If you want to reach a younger audience, you should pay attention to the social networks used by your target audiences, such as Instagram and TikTok.
However, if the idea is to educate the consumer about your products and services, creating a relationship of trust, using a content marketing strategy is the best alternative. At this point, it is worth remembering that these approaches can co-exist beneficially, as long as you know how to manage them.
In all cases, your Digital Marketing plan must be consistent across all channels. Your brand must present a recognizable identity and act according to its missions and values. It is the only way to create authority for your business.
You also need to plan your strategy for the long term — typically, around 6 months is a good starting point, depending on your business type. This will allow you to keep track of when your team will be executing each action point. For example:
By taking this approach, you’ll create a structured timeline for your activity, which will help communicate plans among colleagues.
7. Automate Your Marketing
For a proper digital marketing strategy, you’ll need an effective marketing automation process. As you get your campaigns up and running, you’ll want to find ways to continue to make your campaigns as impactful and effective as possible.
Today’s leading marketing automation platforms can do wonders for your digital marketing strategy, making it easy for you to automate activities such as content marketing, email marketing, lead generation, and more. Thanks to these tactics, you’ll be able to design workflows that will allow you to create hundreds of campaigns with mere clicks. You’ll be able to personalize messages based on your buyer persona, increasing your chances for success; not only that, you’ll be able to take them, depending on their interactions with the brand, towards the moment of purchase.
If your company is still not on board with marketing automation, make sure you add it to your strategy this year.
8. Track Important KPI’s
Even though you accomplish great results in a short time frame, do not make the mistake of contemplating that you’re done with the whole process. Digital Marketing is defined by constantly changing trends and it can affect even the most outstanding method of delivery.
Evaluating the success of the techniques and strategies you implement in your digital marketing should help you determine what doesn’t work in achieving the goals you set.
Keeping this in mind while generating your digital marketing plan and not leaving anything to chance will better help position and boost your brand’s presence in the digital sphere.
You should also remember that technology is your best ally for generating customized, automated, and in the long run, flourishing marketing campaigns. As tasks get complex, the latest tools help simplify your work and boost your performance.
In Conclusion
You’re not going to see results without a digital marketing strategy because you don’t have the correct content in place to get the results. And trust me, that’s the last thing you want with all that time and money you’ve invested.
Creating a digital marketing plan that directs and evaluates your strategy’s progress will help you get more people interested in your business on the fast track.
If the above sounds like a lot of work, and you’re not sure how to get started, you may want to consider some of the marketing plan automation tools such as Growth Channel, to lead you on the right path.
Tell us about your best element of the digital marketing strategy & how that worked for your company?
Share your thoughts and questions in the comments section below! 🙇
