Creating Your First Digital Marketing Plan

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‍A strategic marketing plan is essential to help businesses at any scale reach their target customers. A well-crafted plan will help you reach your target customers, understand your competitors, and differentiate your product or service in a crowded market, without relying on ancillary internet marketing services.

‍Words like ‘marketing strategy’ and ‘marketing plan’ may sound abstract, overly technical or potentially daunting, but it doesn’t have to be. The team at Traktion has put together this concise step-by-step guide to help you get started in crafting your first digital marketing plan.

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STEP 1: CREATING A BUSINESS SUMMARY

First, create a summary of your business operations, objectives, and mission. Include essential information about your business name, team, financial summary and the mission statement of your company. It’s also helpful to always specify the problem that your business is solving.

One way to do this is to conduct a SWOT Analysis, which stands for “Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats”.

This summary will come in handy for future reference, to send to new hires, and also to send to your freelance digital marketer to help them get up-to-speed on your business quickly.

STEP 2: SETTING UP GOALS AND OBJECTIVES

The next step is to set your business goals and objectives, and subsequently the specific metrics upon which these traditional goals and objectives will be measured over time.

Business goals vary, from “increasing market share” in your industry, to “increasing nett revenue to the business”. Each set of goals then needs to be accompanied by a set of business objectives to reach these goals.

For example, in order to reach the goal of “increasing market share”, example objectives could be “increasing monthly unique visitors (MUV)” on your website, “improving check-out cartconversion rate”, and/or “increasing the size of monthly unique subscribers on newsletter list”. It would vary according to your industry, business model, and target audience.

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STEP 3: KNOWING YOUR TARGET CUSTOMERS

A buyer persona is essential in your journey to understand your target customers; these are general descriptions of your ideal customer, such as their age, demographic details, taste and preferences. When creating an ideal buyer persona, ask yourself the following questions.

1. The Basics: What is the gender, age, level of education, work location, and home location of your target customers?
2. Their Values: What problems does your customer want to solve when using your product/ service? Do they care more about price or quality? What values do they have that resonates with your product?
3. Their Channels: Which social media platform(s) does your customer use the most? And how could you leverage these channels to reach your customers?

After creating your ideal buyer personas, you can then start researching into your competitors, and understand their target demographics, brand values, and existing advertising channels. See how your competitors’ audience compares to your intuitive feel of your customers.

Note that our first buyer personas might not always work in reality. As your business progresses, you will get a better understanding of who is it that loves and buys your products.

This also ties back to the SWOT analysis we mentioned earlier. Ask yourself: what are your competitors’ strengths, weakness, opportunities and threats? And why is your product/ service sufficiently different that it appeals to your target customer?

STEP 4: KNOWING YOUR BUDGET

Depending on your goals and objectives, list down the items within your marketing plan, and budget your expenses across the different ad channels and paid media.

Traktion’s Marketers have a strong track record of success in helping companies delineate the allocation of funds across their campaigns. For your digital advertising campaigns, it is almost always recommended that you start with a small budget, split over numerous social experiments across your paid media channels. This allows you to test the channels most relevant to you and your audience, and at a cost-per-acquisition that works well with your margins.

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STEP 5: COMING UP WITH A MARKETING STRATEGY

Your marketing strategy (i.e. marketing mix) would comprise of the above components.

1. Product: Why is my product/ service unique? What problem(s) can my product/service solve?
2. Price: What is the price point of your offering? Does it match your target customers’ budgets? Would you have sufficient margins to offer discounts or offers?
3. Promotion: How could my business actually promote this product/service to our customers? What content can I produce around my product/service that would deliver value to my customers, and at what budget? How can I build trust, longevity and a relationship with my customers?

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Remember to then incorporate and consider the following advertising methods to reach out to your customers through your digital campaigns:

1. SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)
2. SEM (Search Engine Marketing)
3. Content Marketing
4. PR
5. Email Marketing
6. Affiliate Programs
7. Partnership Marketing
8. Leveraging Existing Platforms

We hope you found this quick guide useful to start planning for your digital marketing strategy.

If you’d like a digital marketing specialist to help run, execute and plan for your digital marketing strategy, Traktion.ai is here to help with our exclusive network of pre-vetted digital marketing experts.

Find pre-vetted digital marketers using our Quick Brief function here.