How to Create An Effective Digital Marketing Plan.

Call it a plan, strategy, blueprint, or whatever; an action as necessary as the marketing of your goods or services is one that you shouldn’t take chances on, nor let fate decide its outcome. A digital marketing plan is a document containing the predefined goals, step-by-step approach, and desired results from a digital marketing campaign period. Don’t be that landowner who chooses not to consult an architect because he intends to build only a small house for his family- nothing elaborate; even a small building requires a plan to help manage all resources, including the budget. After reading this article till the end, we expect that you will be able to come up with a digital marketing plan for your business without any pain.

Steps in Laying Out A Digital Marketing Plan That Works.

Understanding The Brand

This is the introductory part of your strategy, and to have a deep understanding of the brand, you must invest time in learning about them. You should touch on the following areas: identification of the brand’s mission, marketing goals, SWOT analysis, and competitive landscape. It involves a whole lot of research to get all the information needed, but what’s a great plan without research? So get right to it! If you are a third-party hired by a business in need of a digital marketing plan, you will need to work closely with someone in-house who would give you some basic information about the brand.

Creating Your Buyer Persona (a.k.a. Customer Avatars)

Before you start a marketing campaign, you need to discover which set of people will need your products and how to reach them. Your buyer persona contains both demographic and psychographic information about who your ideal customer is. However, never forget that if your brand offers several products or services, you will need to create a different buyer persona for each product/service.

Identifying Digital Channels and Strategies

At this stage, you need to determine how you’ll use a mix of all digital channels (owned, earned, and shared media) available to your brand. For starters, you will need a website (one that suits your needs), blog, social media accounts, and a subscribers list (if you decide to run an email marketing campaign). If the brand already has these assets, you will need to do an audit on them and make them both human and SEO-friendly. Your digital marketing plan will also contain a list of keywords the brand will like to rank for. For the social media management aspect, you will need to create a content calendar that shows what will be posted on each platform daily or periodically.

Highlighting KPIs and Expected Results

The  Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) of your marketing effort are values that help you decide if the campaign is heading in the right direction and is aligned with your marketing goals. KPIs simply tracks the performance of your marketing effort. While your campaign period is on, track every activity, and record essential metrics that can be used to justify the invested budget.

Budget Overview

To produce impressive results from your digital marketing efforts, we at Big Field Digital always recommend that you should have an adequate budget to cover all the aspects of marketing you choose to take up. Marketing is a massive part of the success of any brand, so ensure you spend money on campaigns that are likely to give you a good Return on Investment (ROI). Never prepare a digital marketing plan without a budget, and as often as you can, do make use of organic marketing to help you spend less while you get online visibility.

In conclusion, some digital marketers fail to abide by their laid-out strategy because they feel they have a high level of expertise; this is an absolute no-no. Every brand is different, so the marketing of their products or services is also unique as they won’t have the same target audience or goals. It’s fine to derail from your strategy once in a while if you need to include a new action that will lead to the achievement of your marketing goals. However, never neglect the strategy and as you progress during the campaign period, feel free to review the plan and test other ways to arrive at your desired results. It is also essential to hire all the talent you need to form a team as you can’t execute all the plans by yourself, and even if you can, you can’t produce amazing results like an expert will.

Hint: Here are some tools that will come in handy when preparing your digital marketing plan.

• Powerpoint, Canva, Spreadsheet: for creating the strategy document.
• Social media platforms (Facebook, IG, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn): for audience analysis and running social media campaigns.
• Google Analytics, SEMrush, Google Search Console: for keywords research, competitors’ analysis, website analysis and more.

If you need help with implementing an effective digital marketing plan that will work for your brand, reach out to us!