“The purpose of a digital marketing plan for any organisation is to force you through the process of researching and clearly articulating the aims and goals of your digital initiatives, along with clearly targeting digital personas, and methodically choosing which channels to go after them and how.”

– digitalmarketinginstitute.com

As important as digital marketing is in this day and age, not a lot of businesses that use it have actual plans for it. They just wing it from day to day and hope for the best which is a terrible way to run things because it means that their chances of success are left up to fate. Everyone is thrown into confusion when that lucky winning streak suddenly ends because they have no idea what they were doing right in the first place.

The article is here to help businesses with a tried and tested format for developing proper digital marketing plans.

 

1) Market Research And Competitor Analysis:  First step is to do some research on the market space your business’ product/service fits in. This involves an overview of the market, an assessment of the company’s product/service in that market, and a thorough analysis of major competitors (what they’ve done, what they’re doing, things they plan to do etc.)

2) Decide On The Objectives And Goals For The Campaign: Whether it’s brand awareness, increased customer retention, increased sales, etc. the objectives hoped to be achieved by a business with a digital marketing campaign need to be clearly outlined in the early stages of planning.

3) Break The Objectives Down Into Digital Goals: All the goals listed in the previous entry are standard objectives for pretty much every business, but they need to be broken down into digital goals before they can be easily digitally implemented. Take ‘Increase Sales’ for example; breaking this goal down digitally for an online shopping business would most likely look like this:

  • Increase the conversion rate on the website.
  • Increase average order size.
  • Reduce the number of cart abandonment on the checkout process etc.

Only when each goal has been broken down can digital tactics be applied to achieve them.

4) Define KPIs: Set small realistic KPI targets so the digital marketing plan is no longer just what is to be achieved but how it’s going to be achieved.

5) Identify The Right Target Audience: This means the creation of well thought out user personas (the intended target audience) which will include basic demographic information (e.g name, age, location etc.), the possible problems they could have that your business would solve for them, emotional desires, goals and aspirations etc. A good way to find the basic info is to check the audience reports of analytics. Be sure to include as many details as possible.

6) Figure Out a Digital Channel Strategy: This would involve reviewing all the business’ existing digital channels, deciding on the ones to keep, the ones to invest more in, and new ones the business would like to invest in. All this would depend on which channel(s) the target audience is so it’s important to clearly articulate the message(s) to be passed on each channel.

7) Measurement Of Effectiveness: For each of the channels, a clear measurement framework should be put in place where the effectiveness of each one can be measured with the ability to produce a matrix of core metrics that indicate whether KPIs are on track to be met or not.

 

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