Everyone knows the saying; if you fail to plan, you are planning to fail. This is no different for digital marketing. If you wish to create strong strategies to reach and convert your target customer, and create value in your campaigns at every stage and area of the process, knowing how to create a digital marketing plan is crucial. Audeo is here to give you a step-by-step guide on how to create a digital marketing plan. If you wish to have an in-depth business discussion and analysis from industry professionals, book a free 30 minute discovery call today.
Situational Analysis
The first stage in establishing a digital marketing plan is conducting an internal and external analysis of your company. Called the SWOT analysis, this strategy explores your business’ strengths and weaknesses, and your industry’s opportunities and threats.
Let’s take a look at each part in closer detail.
SWOT Analysis
Business
Strengths
What are your business’ main qualities?
What resources do you have?
Which elements of your business influence the success of a sale?
What do others see your strengths to be?
Weaknesses
In what areas could your business improve?
What do competitors do better than you?
Where are your resource limitations?
Which elements of your business can hinder the success of a sale?
Are you lacking the expertise to develop strong digital marketing campaigns?
Industry
Opportunities
Which markets do you have control or access to?
Are there growing market needs for your products/services?
Which areas that you operate in have few competitors?
Is there positive PR coverage of your business?
Threats
Competitor analysis – are there emerging or changing competitors?
Is your business experiencing financial issues?
Is there negative PR coverage of your business?
Are customer attitudes changing in a way that could hinder your business?
SWOT analysis helps you make the most of what your business has. It establishes your strong points. By acknowledging your weak points, you can eliminate hazards that could cause you to fail. Furthermore, an external analysis places your business in its wider context, and helps you establish a unique digital marketing plan unlike any of your competitors’.
Personalisation
Linked to your situational analysis, in order to create a digital marketing plan, you must establish the specifics of your own business. Who are your audience and what makes you unique?
Buyer Persona
A buyer persona is a representation of your target customer. Using customer data and market research, you can establish exactly who uses (or who you want to use) your products or services. A buyer persona includes essentially all information about the target audience; their spending habits, their age, gender, and nationality, their budgets, what challenges they face, and their day to day lives. Creating Buyer Personas helps ensure that all of your marketing activities have your target audience in mind. Each strategie must resort back to the buyer persona to ensure they are linked.
Positioning
Once you have established who your target audience are, you need to determine how you will stand out to them. What makes your business unique within the competition? Why is it that your customers choose your business over others’? Positioning places your business against the backdrop of the wider industry, focusing on what makes you stand out. Do you have the lowest prices, the most efficient customer service, or the most luxurious product? A strong digital marketing plan will ensure that your positioning is crucial in brand promotion.
Establish Business Goals
The next stage is establishing business goals. What are you hoping to achieve in the next year or 5 years? Business goals often start off broad, demonstrating your business’ overall aims. These often take the form of financial growth, brand awareness, entering a new market, and so on.
The key when you are looking into how to create a digital marketing plan, is the specifics. Once you have established your main business goals, you must create specific sub-goals that will demonstrate how you achieve your main goals. Broad business goals result in weak marketing goals. For example, if you wish to increase sales, you need to determine by how much, in what time period, and by which means. For example, your aim may be to have 5,000 online sales on your website in the next 6 months. This goal is clear and gives you specific information to help you develop a tailored marketing strategy to achieve the goal.
SMART goal setting is a method to help construct specific and attainable goals. The SMART method is an acronym;
Specific: what are you measuring? Website visits, new customers, new leads
Measurable: include a figure in your goal
Attainable: realistic goals that fit within the capacity of your business
Relevant: your goals should align with your overall business goal
Timely: ensure to include a time frame of when to reach this goal
Marketing Strategy
Now that the preparation is complete, it is time to develop a marketing strategy. In order to do this, you must explore and assess each of the common digital marketing channels, and determine which will work best to achieve your goals. Audeo will help you determine which is best effective with our strategy sessions. We will assess your situational analysis, personalisation, and business goals. We have tried and tested each and every online marketing strategy with businesses across a range of industries. These sessions will allow us to explore with you which strategies would work best for you, and establish a marketing plan template unique to your business and your short and long term goals. The digital marketing strategies we use are; web design, seo, content marketing, lead generation, email marketing, and PPC.
A Closer Look
A delve into each of the key digital marketing strategies and what purpose they serve in business growth.
Web design
Web design focuses on the behind the scenes of a website, combining beauty with function. A strong website design campaign will ensure a positive user experience (UX). Web design strategies often focus on loading speed, graphic design, user interface design, coding, and search engine optimisation.
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)
Seo, or Search Engine Optimisation, is the strategy you need if you want to rank your website on the first page of search engines. SEO is crucial in increasing organic traffic from customers who are looking for your products or services. Keyword research, content creation, competitor analysis, and link building are the essential components for a strong seo strategy.
Content marketing
Content marketing is central in any social media marketing strategies. Creating strong and engaging content will help promote your brand, and increase interest in your business. Content marketing includes infographics, written content, videos, and slideshares.
Lead generation
Lead generation is the act of discovering and interacting with potential customers for your business. This is an effective way to initiative interest in your brand.
Email marketing
Email marketing is old, but gold. It is an effective tool to retain loyalty from existing customers. Creating newsletters and personalised mail outreach are some of the most effective email marketing methods.
PPC
PPC, or Pay Per Click, is the quickest method for increasing website traffic. Using google ads, it jumps you to the top of the first page of the search results. Better yet, you only pay for the amount of clicks you receive.
