How to Easily Create a Digital Marketing Plan
Wanna know how to create a digital marketing plan? We’ve covered the basic things for you, just read on!
This blog post will cover how important having a digital marketing plan is for your business. We’ll tackle the elements, on how to get the right marketing strategy, and choose the right platforms for your business. You’ll also get to create a content calendar that you’ll use for execution.
All of these create a digital marketing plan that you can use to help grow your business – both online and offline.
Why Should You Create a Digital Marketing Plan?
Your digital marketing plan will serve as the guide for your online marketing efforts. By planning well and creating a detailed strategy and guide to follow, you will have an easier time executing and tracking your marketing efforts regularly. This way, you can also ensure that your marketing messages will reach and connect with your customers.
When you create your digital marketing plan, you need to consider how, where, and how often you want to interact and engage with your customers. Writing all these down into a formal plan will help you create an easy-to-follow roadmap that’s easily trackable and measurable which you can use to set in your business’s digital marketing metrics.
The advantage of tracking and measuring your marketing efforts is that you’ll get to match the current trends in your industry with the trends in your marketing. By mapping out your channels, you can determine which marketing effort works best for your business and niche. This information will be helpful to how you run your projects when to change your marketing mix, and even when to make small changes and improvements to your plans.
When you create a solid digital marketing plan and leverage it well, you can account for regionality, seasonality, and any other time that you expect to see slower and better sales.
Elements of your Digital Marketing Plan
Your digital marketing plan should include four sections:
- Overall Digital Marketing Strategy
- Tactical Action Plan for each digital channel
- Business topics and/or weekly themes i.e. your marketing messages
- Editorial Content Calendar (to help you track and implement your plan)
Choosing a Digital Marketing Strategy
Your digital marketing strategy will basically have two parts: your goal and your plan.
Your goal is the primary objective you want to accomplish using digital marketing, and your plan is the step-by-step guide on how you will accomplish said goal. While it’s possible to have more than one goal, you should only limit it to two or maybe three. It will be unwise to spread your focus too thin, otherwise, you’ll dilute your marketing efforts and you won’t be able to connect with your audience the way you originally intend to.
Goal + Plan = Strategy of
Create a Digital Marketing Plan
Always think about the best-case scenario for your business when you choose a goal or two. Do you want to build brand awareness? Or do you intend to bring more people to your store’s physical location? Be as specific as you can.
For example: if you have an eCommerce website, your number one goal may be to increase your web traffic or it might be to increase the conversion rate among your site visitors. Those goals will definitely result in an increase in sales but each one will require a different approach in creating content and marketing the website.
Think about how you want to approach your business and which goal is best for its growth. No matter the goal you choose, you’ll need a plan to achieve it. Your plan should expand on what steps you need to do to accomplish your goal and it should also include some of the outcomes you hope to achieve as you execute them.
Think about what you want digital marketing to do for you and your business. If you have an eCommerce and physical store, maybe your goal would be to increase both brand awareness and sales. So your plan should include creating a brand presence online that will replicate the product shopping experience in your physical store. Figure out what you can do through online marketing to accomplish the high-level strategic goal that you set for your digital marketing.
Choosing the Right Digital Marketing Channels
After identifying your digital marketing strategy, make a list of channels where you want to do your business online. Include your website, email newsletter, and any other social media platforms that you want to tap into. Also, include any other media outreach you want to take, like partnering with bloggers or podcasters, etc.
A website and an email newsletter and two non-negotiable channels that you must have in order to ensure the success of your digital marketing. The reason is that both your website and your email newsletter are 100% within your control. Social media is never guaranteed. If Facebook or Twitter or Instagram shut down tomorrow, or change the way they do business, then you’ll lose all of your followers, your connections, and your marketing progress made in those platforms. Unlike your website and email newsletter, no matter what happens on any other social media platform, you’ll still own all the content inside your site and email list. Create a Digital Marketing Plan.
Prioritize your Efforts Create a Digital Marketing Plan
When you’ve already decided on which channel you’ll have, list down 5-10 things that you can do that will help you leverage that platform to execute your strategy. It should read almost like a checklist like so:
- Account setup and apply for a business account (if needed)
- Set up tracking
- Post consistently on your website or blog to build credibility and authority
- Post consistently on your social media to build your following and engage your audience
- Create an image of your ideal future state and act on the small steps you can take to get there
- Pay for media if it makes sense
- Create a Digital Marketing Plan
Starting with your website, if you haven’t yet, start with tracking your analytics and improving its content. Fix broken links, misspelled words, and any other simple improvements. When these simple fixes are done, you might also want to rewrite some of your old content, add a blog, and maybe create a sales page. Prioritize the activities you need to do for your website based on its current state because sometimes, the smallest improvements can make the biggest difference.
After each change, check your analytics to make sure that things are moving in the right direction. You should see an increase in traffic, higher conversion rates, and higher average order values if that applies to your business. Consistency in both timing and topic will help your audience relate to you and trust in your brand.
The next step is to work on your email newsletter. How can you improve it to better relate to your audience and have better open rates? Do you write on a regular basis? How’s your current open rate? Experiment and test different times and days of the week to find out the best time and day to send your newsletter. Try changing one thing at a time so that you can easily track them and determine what’s working best for your business. Detail the steps that you can take with your email newsletter on your action plan. For your social media, find out which platform/s will work best for your business. What do you plan on sharing on your socials? Do you have a visual business and want to share images and videos? Consider making an account on Instagram and Pinterest. List down the types of images and posts you’ll use. This will make it easier for your to create your content calendar. You’ll also want to develop a regular schedule for your social media. By having a plan, you’ll be able to work ahead of schedule and really take advantage of your calendar to regularly put out content throughout the week. Consistency in both timing and topic will help your audience relate to you and trust in your brand. Create a Digital Marketing Plan.
When you’ve already built a solid engaging following, you can do paid media as well. Create a list of the actions that you need to check for each social media account. Once you have a list of those free channels, move on to the paid channels. How will you promote your business on social media? Will you pay for Facebook ads? Will you promote pins on Pinterest? You’ll only want to pay for channels where you’ve already engaged with your audience anyway. Don’t expect to promote on a channel where people cannot already find you. You will not get the results you want.
Do you plan to run pay-per-click ads? How often? How much do you plan to spend on these efforts? Think about how you can use pay per click to augment your other efforts to get in front of your already engaged customers and potential customers. Note these on your action plan as well. And finally, on to your other media efforts. If you plan to partner with bloggers, make a list of blog types that you want to be affiliated with. Find out who their audience is, how many visitors they get, and what you have in common. Make a detailed list to easily find blog partners and weed out those blogs that don’t fit your requirements. Have a standard email you can send as a request for partnership to bloggers you want to work with. Create a Digital Marketing Plan.
Once you have an action plan for each digital channel, you’re ready to determine your marketing content topics and how you create them with your content calendar. Create a Digital Marketing Plan.
Weekly Themes and Content Calendar
Now that you’ve identified your strategy and created action plans for each digital marketing channel, you can define your weekly themes and create a content calendar for your business………Choosing Weekly Themes Create a Digital Marketing Plan ……..Planning your content themes and topics will help you create consistent marketing messages for your audience and this will build up your authority and credibility in your industry. The list of topics you made will be used to create your regular content, so this should include the areas where you want your brand to be seen as an expert. If you are selling workout clothes, perhaps you want to be an authority on all things physical and getting fit. Choose the topics that will help you choose who you collab with when you do decide to do those blog or brand partnerships. You can leverage the topic list you create for both your own internal content and what you develop with others.
Have a running list of at least 20 topics so you’ll have enough for daily or weekly themes to use on your website, emails, social media channels, and those partnerships. Start with a list of 20 and weed out the ones that don’t provide value to your business. Add more topics as needed. Remember, just because something doesn’t make the cut now doesn’t mean you can’t use it later. Put your list of topics in a fluid document where you can edit it regularly. You can always add and delete ideas if you need to. Once you have your topic list, you can use that list, plus your channel action plan to help you develop your content calendar.
Create a Content Calendar.
Use any tool that works for you.
Create several versions of the same message or different messages that follow the weekly theme
- Plan ahead
- Be consistent
- Track your marketing over time
- Measure performance of each platform and message
Organization is definitely the key to success in digital marketing.
Your content calendar should be an editorial calendar and should show each digital marketing channel and how you plan to use them to promote, build, and increase awareness about your brand. You can use a spreadsheet, a note-taking tool (like notion), a notebook, or anything to create your content calendar. Whatever it is you’ll use, make sure it’s something you can actually check, fill out, and report back to regularly to measure the progress of your campaigns and projects. The tool you use doesn’t matter. The planning is what matters. Moreover, be organized. Be mindful of the calendar and be mindful of the market. The organization is definitely the key to success in digital marketing.……………Create a Digital Marketing Plan
Create a Digital Marketing Plan, Once you made your content calendar and have your weekly topic or theme, you can build each post around each topic. You can then easily work in advance and spend less time on the day the actual post goes out. Learn how to schedule ahead of time so you won’t be scrambling on the day your messages go live. Write all of your copies in advance. Create all of your content in advance. Choose your images in advance. Then check your marketing messages for consistency with your brand and your overall theme in order to set yourself up for success over time.
Planning is vital for your overall digital marketing success. Use your content calendar. You should be referring back to it as often as needed in order to be successful in your digital marketing.
Wrap Up
Congratulations on creating your digital marketing plan! I hope you use your plan to help you create marketing messages and content that connects with your customers.
Review your plan every few months or so to ensure you get the maximum benefit for your business and for your customers. You can repeat the entire process outlined in this blog post or just revisit the execution aspects if you know your strategy is still on target.
It’s easy to create a digital marketing plan with these steps. Hopefully, this post helped you in this endeavor.
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