A digital marketing plan is a document outlining the marketing plan. It includes short and long-term business goals, strategies to achieve these goals, channel to be used, action plan, schedule, and budget
The Necessity Of A Digital Marketing Plan
Having an effective digital marketing plan is important to attain the objectives of your brand. Here is an explanation of why you need a digital marketing plan.
- A Digital Marketing plan helps to guide actions that all team members need to follow. It sets a clear objective and provides a path of action.
- A good digital marketing plan allows you to research your target audience and the external environment of your business. It provides detailed knowledge of the target audience and market.
- A digital marketing plan helps you to align your brand objectives with digital marketing actions so that the company can receive its objectives by implementing the plan.
- A digital marketing plan eliminates overlapping and irrelevant activities. It ensures clarity of actions and thoughts.
How To Make An Effective Digital Marketing Plan
Here are some steps that need to be followed to prepare an effective digital marketing plan. This will let you know how to plan a digital marketing strategy.
Analyze Your Current Situation
The first stage to plan a digital marketing strategy is analyzing the current situation of the company. You also need to examine what your product or service is, what’s your company’s Unique Selling Proposition (USP), what you have done so far in online marketing, what you have achieved till now, and what people are saying about your brand online. You also need to analyze your website and check whether it needs to be improved. In addition, you also need to investigate what your competitors are doing to market their products or service and what you can learn from them.
Establish Digital Marketing Objectives
Once you analyze your current situation, work on establishing goals to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve. You can work on setting SMART goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound.
Specific: The objective must be specific and detailed answering what, when, who, where, and how.
Measurable: The goals should be measurable. Use specific KPIs to define progress.
Attainable: The goals should not be too ambitious that they can’t be achieved.
Relevant: The goals should be feasible and match with company’s objectives.
Time-Bound: The goals should have specific deadlines.
Define Buyer Persona
After setting objectives, next you need to define buyer persona that must include demographic information like age, occupation, gender, income, and location of the target audience, their current relationship with the brand, their online behavior, and their expectations from the brand. After that, you need to assess the value proposition of your brand defining why customers should choose your brand.
Content Strategy
Now is the time to decide what kind of content you need to create and how you will transmit it to your target audience to attract them and position the brand.
You will require some tools to effectively create a content strategy. The first is Keyword Research Tool to find the right keyword for your content so that its rank improves organically. The second tool is the Content Calendar which includes the date of publication of the content, topic, keywords, and relevant hashtags.
Platforms and Digital Strategies
The next step is to decide which social media platform you will use. Social media offers various platforms where you can promote your brand. You need to find out which platform will be suited the most concerning your digital marketing objectives and the target audience. Using different social networks can be more beneficial instead of sticking to just one platform.
After that, you need to focus on what strategies you will apply. You may go for website optimization. paid media advertising, email marketing campaigns, and SEO. You should include the use of marketing automation tools to automate the marketing campaign.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Analyzing the results is a crucial part of digital marketing strategy to understand the progress and where improvements are needed. You can collect data and compare it with actual goals. It can be done on a weekly or monthly basis. For example, “Engagement” can be one of your KPIs. To calculate it,
Engagement= likes + comments + shares / followers
Contingency Plan
A contingency plan defines what will happen when the goals will not be achieved. For each of the KPIs, you need to decide on the response plan if the desired goals are not attained.
Final Thoughts
You have learned about how an effective digital marketing plan can be created. The objective of your digital marketing plan should be clear, specific, and aligned with your company’s objectives. You need to choose specific KPIs to measure the progress of your strategy. You need to be proactive while dealing with the situation when the desired objectives are not achieved. I hope you now understand how to plan a digital marketing strategy.