How To Create A Digital Marketing Plan for Your Business
Digital marketing is also known as internet marketing or online marketing and it’s about identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements in the digital sphere while achieving your business goals.
It encompasses a wide range of online channels including pay per click advertising, search engine optimization, social media marketing, email marketing, and affiliate marketing. It also involves tracking, measuring, monitoring and managing online campaigns to meet business goals, while satisfying target markets needs and wants. So, all activities start with goals and objectives and customers are at the heart of all operations.
So you’ve decided to create a digital marketing plan to help you achieve your business goals and mission, but do not know where to start? Fear not! Creating a plan is easier than you think.
The 7 Most Important Elements of an Effective Digital Marketing Plan
1. Online Marketing Audit
You should carry out an internal audit of your organization that covers all your stakeholders, to ensure you have the resources in place to launch your strategy. This will include your customers, what they need and what devices and online channels they use. You will also audit your competitors to see where they are advertising online and how well resourced they are.
Many tools will be handy here including Moz tools, Alexa, and Screaming Frog.
You will also carry out an external audit which covers details that are outside the control of your organization like cookie usage legislation, trends in smartphone usage by customers and many others that you need to review constantly.
2.Analysis
Evaluate your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Based on your audit findings, you will have identified your strengths about your competitors and combined with your unique selling point; this will form your basis for competing. You will also need to work on your weaknesses and minimize them and ultimately work towards turning them into strengths. Your opportunities and threats will be external to your business, and you will list the most important ones and decide on how to capitalize on them and minimize the threats.
3.Competition
You will identify your direct and indirect competitors and study their digital marketing strategies to make yours unique and offer greater value to customers. There are many resources available online to study competitors including search engines, Hitwise, and eMarketers.
4. Target Audience
Having identified the audience that you want to target, decide on which ones to target based on your resources (financial and time). It’s usually not possible to target all segments because of resource constraints so you should pick the most viable. Ultimately, you want to build a relationship with your customers, and the Internet is a great channel to do this compared to traditional brick and mortar stores. For example, social media offers several platforms to engage with your clients while online reviews provide ways for your customers to become advocates for your brand and business.
5. The Marketing strategy
The marketing strategy covers all the tactics of your plan and includes the 7 Ps of the marketing mix: product, price, place, promotion, people, process and physical evidence. You will describe your products or services, what prices you will charge and what online promotional tools and channels you will use to reach your target markets. Some promotional tools you will include are SEO, PPC, social media, affiliate marketing, email marketing, online sponsorship, and blogging.
Your strategy could be for the short-term like 6 – 12 months, or long-term like 2 – 5 years or a combination of both. However, with the rapid changes in the online world, short-term strategies are often more suitable.
Overall, the strategy sets out the activities you will do to achieve your objectives and ultimately your goals and mission.
6. Budgets and Control
With the information, you have gathered about your objectives, target markets, your competitors, marketing strategy, you can now set a budget to implement your tactics. So your budget will list all tactics relating to your products or services, promotions and processes and what the cost of each will be.
It’s important that you have a sufficient budget to be able to implement strategy and achieve your objectives and if you have a limited one, you can always prioritize your tactics.
Mike Ncube is a Digital Marketing Consultant, and Marketing Author and his latest book are “The DIY Guide to Online Marketing Success.” He blogs regularly about the latest digital marketing trends, and he has published books, case studies & white papers that will help you with your campaigns.
7. Create a retention plan
If you are getting a high volume of customers through your digital marketing special offers, create a plan on how to gain repeated business from them once they make their first purchase. You cannot keep eroding your profit margins by continuously offering discounted deals.
If a small business wishes to use daily deals as part of their digital marketing program, they should begin planning for their post-deal customer relationship from the beginning. This means thinking about loyalty programs, refer-a-friend deals, combination offers and so on. One strategy that is commonly recommended by digital marketing professionals is an email program, which encourages new people to enter their contact details in a sign-up form, in return for an exclusive offer for their next purchase.
Do you need a digital marketing plan for your business? We can help you out, just contact us 🙂