Digital marketing has become tremendously more complex since the dawn of the internet. Back then, businesses rarely created a digital marketing plan. And those that did mainly concentrated mostly on websites, ad networks, and email marketing.
Now, you have numerous digital marketing channels and platforms to choose from. Should you focus on SEO or PPC? Blogging or webinars? Social media or email? Podcasts or video marketing? Augmented Reality (AR) or Virtual Reality (VR)? How should you spend and when can you anticipate seeing results?
Trying to choose the possible opportunities for your brand can feel overwhelming, and intimidating even.
What you Need is a Digital Marketing Plan
A coherent strategy allows you to determine the most effective strategy for the company and then put those strategies into action. A digital marketing plan helps you to manage your initiatives so that you’re continually connecting with your audience, engaging them, and driving them to action. With a digital marketing business strategy, you plan logically, coordinate among departments, and integrate your digital marketing for significant emphasis.
Read on, and learn nine steps to effectively implement a digital marketing plan.
What is a Digital Marketing Plan?
A digital marketing plan is a document in which you strategically outline your digital marketing goals and the actions you will take to achieve those goals. This may include, but is not limited to, business goals, digital strategy, and analysis of the competitive landscape, as well as schedules, budgets, digital channels, and more. Think of a digital marketing plan as a kind of road map. You know where you want to go, and the plan gives you a specific path to follow. Without a well-defined plan, your digital marketing efforts will be inefficient and ineffective. You will likely waste money and see lower returns.
How to Create a Digital Marketing Plan
Now let's talk about the different components of the digital marketing plan speak. as well as the specific steps you need to follow to develop your strategy.
1. Define your digital marketing and business goals
Clear, measurable, and achievable goals in your digital marketing plan will help you define exactly what you want to achieve and measure. Be clear and concise when setting these goals. You should also provide specific numbers and time frames to compare your progress. For example, avoid goals that say you will update your lead generation system, increase conversion rates, or improve the digital customer experience. These are a bit too vague. You can't measure your results and it's not obvious what steps you need to take to achieve that goal.
Instead, doubling your organic search traffic over the next 12 months is a much better goal. This will give you a framework for setting deadlines, milestone goals, and specific actions that need to be taken (optimising your website, creating great content, conducting strategic SEO outreach, etc.) is obtained.
2. Define Audience Segmentation and Buyer Personas
The main reason digital marketing is important is that you can target your audience with great precision.
To run a successful digital marketing campaign, you need to know your target audience. Segmenting your audience and creating buyer personas for each of those segments will give you insight into what types of marketing work best.
Suppose you sell IT services. Some of the target users may be small businesses with sales of less than $500,000. You can also sell to large enterprises with critical IT needs. Each of these segments has very different buyer personas and marketing strategies. A message that reaches the owner of a small business is unlikely to reach the head of a large IT department, and vice versa. Start by defining different segments of your target audience. From there, start building your ideal customer persona in each segment. Here are nine great persona examples to get you started.
Buyer persona information varies depending on whether you are B2B or B2C and the price of your product/service. Demographics and additional information that may be included include:
Age Group
Income
Job Title
Position
Priority
Target
Task
Interest
Social Media Platform
Industry
Problem
Desired Product/Function
The goal when creating personas is to get into the mind of your target customer and see things from their point of view. By understanding what's most important to them, you can craft a digital marketing plan that appeals to their deepest desires and biggest challenges.
3. Conduct Competitive Analysis and Determine The Market Share
If you want your marketing efforts to be effective, you need to know your audience. Competitor analysis allows us to identify our competitors, calculate their market share, and determine the marketing strategies they employ.
Consider the following in your competitive analysis:
What audience segments are they trying to hit?
What digital marketing channels are your other business like yours using?
What are their strengths?
What are their challenges?
What percentage of your traffic is earned/owned/paid?
What is your position in the market?
What is their claimed differentiation?
What kind of communication do they use and what language do they use?
What are their approach and brand qualities?
A comprehensive competitive landscape analysis provides insight into how to use online marketing to outperform the competition. Gain insight. For example, if your competitor's positioning and differentiation are known, you may benefit from embodying your own in contrast. Or you may find yourself strong in social media marketing but weak when it comes to search engine optimisation (SEO) performance.
4. Conduct a SWOT analysis
SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) is the counterpart to competitive landscape analysis. It provides a framework for analysing your business against other forces in the market. Use this process to discover what's working, identify potential organic growth opportunities, and prepare for external threats.
Analysing your company's strengths is the first step. What is your main edge over your competitors? What are you particularly good at? What unique resources are available?
Then look at your weaknesses. What elements of your business are not working particularly well? What is holding back your sales? How do you lag behind your competitors?
The third step is to consider the opportunities available to your business. Are there market trends that you can benefit from? Can you use new technologies that your competitors cannot? Are there segments of your target group that are underserved?
Finally, identify potential threats to your business. Are competitors likely to take market share? Are there obstacles to business growth? Are there potential financial problems on the horizon? Data from a SWOT analysis can help you create your digital marketing plan. Planning should focus on strengths, mitigate weaknesses, address opportunities, and proactively avoid potential threats. All in the name of helping increase sales.
5. Calculate a Budget for your Digital Marketing Plan
The next step in creating the most promising digital marketing plan for your brand is calculating your budget. A budget determines how much money you can spend on your digital marketing activities and directs it toward specific channels, strategies, and tactics.
Your digital marketing budget depends on many factors, including:
Earnings
Position in the Industry
Previous Result
Target
Position
Strategic, Tactical, or Campaign Profitability
How much do you allocate for brand awareness campaigns? What about specific promotions and offers? Do you allocate a fixed digital marketing budget for customer retention? Do you know how much to spend on SEO?
Setting a budget in advance is important. But be flexible so you can take advantage of opportunities for higher SEO ROI. If you find that a particular campaign isn't generating a positive ROI for him, you may want to cut back on that expense. Similarly, if you find that certain campaigns (or channels) are performing above average, you should shift your budget and allocate additional budget to those that are performing well. If you have a specific cost/benefit ratio in mind that is highly profitable, increase your budget as long as your acquisition cost is below your target.
In this way, budgets can become a dynamic and evolving support mechanism for digital marketing initiatives.
6. Define Your Digital Marketing Channels
Before you develop your content strategy, you should define the primary digital marketing channels you will use. Your channel selection should consider your audience, goals, and budget.
Let's say your goal is to increase targeted traffic to your website by 30%. One way to do this is through PPC advertising. This will give you an instant boost. However, Google Adwords can also be expensive.
Look to low-cost channels like SEO and content marketing for better ROI. These channels take longer to see results, but they are more cost-effective due to their much lower upfront costs. and ready for sustainable success.
When defining your digital channel, consider where your audience spends the most time. If you're in the B2B industry, we recommend keeping an eye on channels like LinkedIn and webinars. If you have a younger audience, consider influencer marketing on Instagram. Focus on how to add value to your audience on the channels they prefer.
Also, don't assume your audience doesn't care about good content. Some of the best examples of content marketing come from different companies with very different customers.
7. Develop Digital Marketing Strategies and Tactics
Once you've defined your channels, you need to develop the digital marketing tactics and strategies you'll use within those channels.
For example, if you're focused on search engine optimization, you'll need to decide which keywords to target and how to target them. You can choose to create a comprehensive content hub, online course, SEO topic cluster, or set of online tools. Alternatively, we can provide more in-depth and better guides, provide insight into upcoming trends, or provide content with celebrity appearances. If your focus is on B2B lead generation, we recommend creating a case study to showcase your findings. As you review your digital marketing plan, look for ways to differentiate yourself from your competitors. for example:
In a traditionally boring industry, the Dollar Shave Club caught people's attention with their fun and irreverence.
Tableau offers a free online tool and collected backlinks from over 56,000 of its websites. LEGO has created an interactive online community with over 300,000 monthly organic visits. The more crowded the market, the harder it is to strive to grab attention and achieve true optimization across your digital marketing portfolio. No matter what, stay true to your brand as you build your digital marketing strategy.
8. Create a Marketing Calendar
Marketing calendars help you pinpoint exactly when to launch your digital marketing campaigns and initiatives. It also ensures accountability, meeting deadlines, and effective execution of plans throughout the year. Calendars also help you reach each of your different audience segments consistently throughout the year.
Try to plan 12 months and divide the calendar into each month of the year. This gives you an overall framework and plenty of time to prepare and execute each delivery. For example:
In January, we will release a training webinar. Before sharing, you need to create slide decks, create landing pages, design graphics for social media, and more. Promote your training webinars in January and February on multiple channels including social media, email, video, and PR.
In March, we will launch a weekly updated blog. To accomplish this, you'll need to decide on topics, assign authors, coordinate with designers, create a blog calendar, and organize videos to embed. Think realistically when creating an editorial calendar. Take enough time to do everything in a quality way and make sure each achievement is attributed to a specific person. Popular marketing planning tools include CoSchedule, Contently, and Trello.
9. Measure the Results and KPIs of your Digital Marketing Plan
The final step in creating a digital marketing plan and strategy is to define metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure results. You should compare the results of your marketing efforts with what you were trying to achieve in the first place. If the results don't satisfy you, adjust, fine-tune, and measure again. As a marketer, be sure to measure each channel so you can see what works best for your brand and what you need to cut back on.
Keep your entire marketing team up to date with dashboards. Popular marketing dashboard tools include Klipfolio, TapClicks, Grow, and Domo.
A Good Digital Marketing Plan to Drive Integration
The process of developing a digital marketing plan facilitates marketing integration and increases business impact. Customers cannot ignore your brand if you consistently engage with them in your messages, offers, and calls to action. As a result, marketing resources can be efficiently and intelligently repurposed and segmented to do more with less.
Whether your business is an established e-commerce brand or a brick-and-mortar juggernaut, you need to have a digital marketing plan in place. This is where you need DigitalxMarketing. It takes time, effort, and coordination, but it's worth it. Your marketing will be much more effective and you will get better marketing results for your company.
DigitalxMarketing Ltd has its head office in Wellington NZ with its support and resource centre based in the Philippines. DigitalxMarketing implements the latest digital strategies, tactics, tools, platforms and technologies to deliver integrated digital marketing services so your digital footprint can be found online.
Contact DigitalxMarketing today!