5 Steps To Create a Digital Marketing Strategy Plan

When it comes to marketing your business plan, sometimes there are simply so many options available that it can be hard to know where to start! In addition, digital marketing can seem especially overwhelming, with so many social media platforms and websites to choose from. Still, if you’re looking to maximize the growth of your business truly, you’ll want to develop an overall digital marketing strategy plan that includes all aspects of online marketing. In this article, we’ll walk you through five steps for creating your own digital marketing strategy plan!

What is Digital Marketing?

By definition, the digital marketing is the process of promoting products or brands through the internet. This can include social media, blogs, websites, and many other forms of online advertising. Digital marketing is great for businesses to reach their customers using technology. It’s an affordable, easy and effective way for small business owners to get their products in front of potential customers.

How to Execute Easy & Effective Digital Marketing Strategy?

Now that you know the different channels and tactics, you can start creating your digital marketing strategy with five simple yet powerful steps.

• Identify your target audience.
• Develop buyer personas
• Conduct a SWOT analysis
• Create SMART business goals
• Determine your budget.

Identify Your Target Audience

To tailor your marketing campaign, it is essential to know your target audience. You should not assume that everybody wants what you have or that your product or service will appeal to everyone. When determining your target audience, you will want to ask yourself the following questions: 

• Who would be interested in my product/service? 
• What would interest them?
•  What are their age groups? –
•  What gender are they? 
• Where do they live geographically? 
• What other industries or services might also suit their needs?
• Why would they need this product or service, and how does it fit into their life?
• How often can I expect this person to use my company’s products/services?
• Is there any other information about this person that might help me define them more precisely? (e.g., Social media platforms used)
• What will make this person share our content or buy our product? 
• What can we offer them as an incentive to share?
• How do we stand out from our competitors?
• What types of promotions work best for this type of person? -Who are my competitors, and what distinguishes us from them?
• Does the return outweigh the cost?
• How does social media play into my strategy? Should I focus more on Facebook ads or Google AdWords?
• Do I need to learn new skills like coding or graphic design? Should I hire someone with those skills instead?
• Is there anything else I should consider before finalizing my plan?

This segmentation considers factors such as purchase history, brand loyalty, consumption of content, and software usage.

Develop Buyer Personas

One of the first things you’ll want to do is develop buyer personas. These are fictional representations of your ideal customer. The more detailed, specific, and realistic these personas are, the better you’ll be able to decide where and how your business should spend its resources. 

For instance, if a persona is a stay-at-home mom with young children who likes using Facebook, then social media may not be the best place for your company to invest its time and money. 

Create an Action Plan: 

Once you know who you’re targeting, it’s time to create an action plan based on their needs. For example, what content will they need? How often will they need it? When do they need it?

SWOT Analysis

SWOT analysis is a process that identifies your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. By creating a SWOT analysis, you will be able to identify the opportunities for your business while also seeing the potential problems and risks that could get in the way of achieving success.

 To do this, you need to list these items on a separate line and then rank them according to their importance. For example, strengths should be ranked on top, followed by weaknesses, followed by opportunities, and finally, threats. 

When conducting a SWOT analysis, it is important to look at what has already happened and what might happen in the future. Conducting an effective digital marketing strategy requires making sound decisions about what goals are attainable, given current resources and constraints. 

Conducting an external environmental scan:

 To conduct an effective digital marketing strategy, necessary to understand how external factors can impact your organization and know how they will change over time so you can have a contingency plan if something unexpected occurs.

 Conducting an external environment scan involves identifying trends, identifying barriers, and predicting changes to better prepare your business.

Create SMART Business Goals

Developing SMART business goals is an effective way to understand the direction you want your company to go. Creating objectives for your digital marketing strategic plan will help clarify what needs to be done. Start by answering these five questions: 

1) What does your company want its image and reputation to be?

2) What are some important keywords related or unrelated that the company wants on search engines like Google? 

3) Do you have any niche markets where this business can excel over competitors? 

4) Is there anything new you want to try that might draw the attention of potential customers?

 5) Who do you want to attract with your business idea, and how would they come across it online?

Measurable

Measurable means staying on top of deadlines for meeting the end goal and ensuring that the goals are attainable and tangible.

Attainable

The goal is to determine whether the goals are within reach based on the current constraints. For example, can a company achieve the goal based on existing skills and resources, or does a change need to be made?

Relevant

Making sure that these goals are relevant is critical because they’re measured based on how they contribute to the business’s overall objectives. So it’s all about what is most effective right now, not the past.

Timely

This area discusses how quickly a company can progress toward a goal. Goals need a timeframe to make them happen. The goal is a certain timeline, and one should carefully weigh whether the goal can be met at the desired timeline.

Determine Your Budget

The amount of money you have will determine the type of business ideas you’ll be able to execute. For example, if you’re looking for affordable marketing strategies, then Facebook and Twitter ads may be your best option. On the other hand, pay-per-click advertising on Google or Yahoo might be your route if you’re looking for more expensive options.

Budgeting for digital marketing is crucial to its success. Digital marketing strategies are only as effective as the budget allocated to them. Therefore, cash is essential for success.

A marketer needs to determine which marketing tactics are affordable and achievable. An organization needs to determine what budget can make marketing tactics successful. Find out where more investment is required and where less is required.

Bringing It All Together

Before you build your website or create content, you must have an overarching digital marketing strategy. These five things will help: 

– Analyze your competitors’ campaigns and content 

– Define your target audience and their goals 

– Determine what social media platforms are best for your business 

– Create posts that align with the goals of your audience and are authentic enough for them to share with others 

– Evaluate success with analytics tools such as Google Analytics

Marketing Campaign 

A successful digital marketing campaign starts with an idea but needs more than just a creative idea. The key is planning and research. To start, you need to know your goals and objectives for the campaign, find out how your audience will interact with you (through keywords or search engine optimization), and analyze the competition. Then once you have all of that information, it’s time to determine which channels will be best for reaching your objectives.

Choose your main platforms.

One of the first decisions is choosing what platforms will be your digital business’s focus. Your small business might start on Facebook, but as it grows, you might want to add Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, or another platform that can target different markets and audiences. 

For example, if your main customers are millennials, they are more likely to interact with social media than people with children at home and working full-time. But if your main customers are businesses with employees over 35 years old, then LinkedIn might be the better option for them. Social media for marketing strategy has changed a lot in recent years, so make sure you’re up to date on the latest trends and insights before making any decision. 

Identify your KPIs (key performance indicators).

You need to know your KPIs to measure your success and make informed decisions. KPIs are quantitative data points that can be used to measure performance. For example, the most common KPIs for social media marketers reach impressions, engagement rates (comments and likes), referral traffic, and conversions.

Depending on the goals of your business or organization, these KPIs may vary greatly. For example, suppose you’re an educational institution with many students and faculty across multiple states. In that case, Facebook’s Reach metric may be more important than Engagement Rates or Referral Traffic in the Midwest Region. 

Understanding which KPIs will indicate success is crucial when formulating a social media marketing strategy, regardless of the type of company you’re working with.

Determine all possible channels and tools.

While there are many channels and tools, it is important to only focus on the ones that will work best for your business. This will ensure you have a cohesive and effective campaign. 

You can also use this information to decide what channels and tools would be necessary for your team members.

Review analytics

 You should always monitor metrics like page views, time on site, bounce rates, etc., to find out what works and doesn’t work so you can iterate accordingly with future campaigns.

Specific

Specific business ideas that are in your area of expertise. This section covers specifics about what a company wants to achieve, who will be involved in doing so, why achieving the goal is important, and what it takes to meet that goal.

Teams and DRIs

 Your marketing plan will be implemented by teams and individuals responsible for creating assets and budgets and analyzing metrics once campaigns are complete.

Design

Plan how you’ll use design elements to attract your audience. Your plan design should directly relate to the purpose of your campaign.

Map it out

The final step is mapping out your strategy. This is where you decide what tactics you want to use, which channels you’ll use, how you’ll measure success and the timeline for your campaign.

If you’re using more than one channel, starting by identifying your overarching goals for the campaign is helpful. These can include driving traffic to a landing page with lead capture forms, engaging current customers through social media, or building brand awareness with advertising campaigns on TV. 

Once you have those goals set to target small businesses, you can figure out how each channel will help achieve them so that everything is aligned behind one unifying theme.

Social Media Marketing Plan Templates

The larger the marketing department grows, the more need for that department to increase its social media presence. In addition, as the department’s social media presence grows, there will be more of a need to figure out how to promote specific pieces of content on different platforms.

Look at this list of social media marketing templates below for anyone looking for a new way to update your social media marketing plan even more deeply than the above plan template can provide.

• Keep a monthly calendar of your social media spending.
• A weekly discussion of social media’s hot button issues.
• Required dimension for a social media image
• Pie chart indicating social media usage.
• A social media scheduling program for publishing posts to the calendar

How to Start a Business Marketing Planning Process Today

Getting quick wins in the first quarter will help you ramp up fast and set yourself up to hit more challenging goals, and take on more sophisticated projects in the fourth quarter. What do you think? Interested in giving it a try? These five simple steps will help start your digital marketing strategy plan.