How can you successfully create a digital marketing plan for your business?
At our digital marketing agency, we consider all the important aspects that will help us achieve our goals in all our marketing plans. Market analysis, competitor analysis, SEO and web positioning , strategies, social media, objectives, and metrics—that's what you'll need to do if you want to succeed.
Launching digital marketing actions without a pre-designed plan or strategy could lead to failure due to a failure to consider all the aspects that could impact their development. When developing a digital marketing plan, it should include components such as determining your target audience (buyer persona), business objectives, and an appropriate value proposition.
What is a digital marketing plan?
A digital marketing plan is a document that shares all the details of a digital marketing campaign or action . These include:
-Short, medium and long-term business goals.
-Strategies to achieve objectives at a digital level.
– The channels to be used.
– Action and development plans.
– Investment and budget.
– The calendar and the roadmap.
According to Philip Kotler , considered one of the fathers of modern marketing, a traditional marketing plan serves: "To document how the organization's strategic objectives will be achieved through specific marketing strategies and tactics, with the customer as the starting point. It is also linked to the plans of other departments within the organization."
With this in mind, does your company need a digital marketing plan?
The answer is yes.
You need it for:
Attract, convince, convert, and make your customers fall in love with your product or service.
Plan all the strategies and actions to reach your target customer.
Segment your marketing campaigns to deliver value at every stage.
Before developing the steps that define the structure of a digital marketing plan, you should be comfortable with your company's online presence, your objective, the channels you should be present on, and who your competitors are and what they do.
Below, we'll give you a step-by-step breakdown of the structure of your digital marketing plan.
Situation analysis
The first thing you should do when developing your digital marketing plan is conduct an internal and external analysis (SWOT analysis) of your brand . A useful framework for this is a SWOT analysis, which allows you to observe the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and weaknesses of your company and the market in general. We need to be familiar with the ecosystem in which we operate, the needs of our customers, and the needs we satisfy.
This analysis is equally qualitative as it is quantitative, through the observation of factors such as digital habits, intermediaries, influencers, and more. Implementing benchmarking techniques designed to identify digital best practices and success stories and applying them to business has become an increasingly important part of a company's overall strategy.
We also need to conduct an internal analysis to understand our company's position in the digital age: Is our website customer-oriented? What is the user experience and user experience like? Do we update our blog regularly? What is our website's current positioning? And what is our social media presence like? What types of social networks will we be working on?
Set digital marketing goals
Once you have your market position and strengths in mind, work on setting some goals to get a clear idea of where your actions should take you.
Everything you plan must work toward achieving those goals. You can consider the SMART goal framework to develop this part of your digital marketing plan: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely goals. Here's an example: Not a SMART goal: "I want to increase the number of visits to my website." SMART goal: "I want to reach 20,000 visits per month to my website every month within three months. To do this, I will do A, B, and C."
Define the marketing strategy
Once you've defined your business objectives, what are you going to do to achieve them? Personalization is increasingly important in digital marketing. Therefore, when defining your strategy to carry out your plan, keep these factors in mind:
- Segmenting your target audience: Know who you want to talk to, what their tastes, needs, or preferences are, where they're looking to meet their expectations, etc. This is the time to create your buyer persona.
- Positioning: To achieve proper positioning, it's essential that you're crystal clear (and reach your audience in the same way) about your value proposition and what it entails. In short, this is why consumers should choose you over the competition. You need to know how you're going to communicate your unique value proposition and how to do so appropriately on the channels where your audience is present (social media, blogs, email marketing, and more).
- Content strategy: This is important for creating, distributing, and managing original content that engages users and positions the brand as a reference in their minds. You also need to develop a specific communication plan (content marketing) for each channel. Some of the tools we use to implement this strategy are:
- Keyword research : This involves identifying the right keywords to use correctly in your content to organically improve your SEO ranking. If you want users to find you in search engines , this is essential for any content strategy.
- Content calendar: A content calendar is key to ensuring your strategy makes sense. It provides value; allows you to think long-term and optimize resources; helps generate ideas; and so on. In a content calendar, you should include the publication date, author, post topic, keywords, tags to use/consider, and so on.
- Social Posting: Writing an article and not promoting it on social media is a mistake. It's not about spamming, but rather planning what you're going to publish and when on each social media platform, with the most appropriate copy for each, all while containing the optimal number of characters, links, hashtags, etc.
- You should also consider: What your audience is like. What topics you'll be talking about. What tone you'll use. How often you'll be posting.
Digital strategies and tactics
Based on our objectives (attraction, conversion, and loyalty), we will begin implementing different strategies: email marketing campaigns , social media, CRM, web optimization, SEO strategies, paid media advertising, etc.
Today, as the number of channels to manage increases and the amount of information we gather about our customers increases, it's essential to use marketing automation tools that allow you to automate your marketing campaigns.
Thanks to these tactics, you'll be able to create workflows that will allow you to create hundreds of campaigns with just a few clicks. You'll be able to personalize messages based on your buyer persona, increasing your chances of success. Not only that, you'll be able to guide them toward the moment of purchase, depending on their interactions with the brand. Technology has become a fundamental tool for implementing digital strategies, so it's essential that you learn to make the most of it.
Measuring results and KPIs
The work doesn't stop after you've designed and implemented your digital marketing strategy. The next step is one of the most important: analyzing the results.
Analytics has become a fundamental pillar for successfully optimizing digital marketing performance and spending. We need to measure every action using KPIs to determine if we achieved the ROI we expected.
Measuring the effectiveness of the strategies and activities we implement in our digital marketing will help us correct what isn't working and achieve our stated goals. Make sure you have an effective real-time data visualization system in place.
The digital world is evolving rapidly, so you must be constantly alert to identify opportunities and room for improvement. Keep these steps in mind when creating your digital marketing plan and leave nothing to chance; it's your biggest enemy if you're looking to position yourself and increase your presence in the digital space.
Also, remember that technology can be your best ally for personalization, automation, and ultimately successful marketing activities. As the task becomes more complex, new tools available allow you to simplify your work and improve your performance.